According to Woofun AI, on October 22, Morpho officially launched a stock token lending market on Robinhood Chain, marking the evolution of Robinhood stock tokens from purely trading assets into round-the-clock financial instruments with collateral financing capabilities.
This move allows users to borrow stablecoins using tokenized stocks as collateral even on weekends when Nasdaq is closed, completely breaking the trading time boundaries of traditional stock markets.
The explosive growth in trading volume during non-trading hours confirms this demand. According to crypto researcher Tom Wan of Entropy, between September 24 and October 23, 59% of stock token trading volume on the Robinhood platform occurred outside regular US trading hours: of the total $3.7 billion in volume, only $1.5 billion occurred during regular hours, while $2.18 billion occurred outside regular hours, comprising $677 million in pre-market, $608 million overnight, $363 million after-hours, and $532 million on weekends (weekends being part of the outside-regular-hours figure).
Meanwhile, competitive dynamics are accelerating: since September 25, Aave has launched similar lending services for Coinbase tokenized stocks, further intensifying competition among protocols.
The lending thresholds and geographic restrictions of traditional brokerages form the deeper backdrop for the rise of tokenized lending. In the US, opening a Regulation T margin account requires a $2,000 minimum, with lending capped at only 50% of stock market value; Charles Schwab's pledged asset line requires a minimum of $100,000 with an interest rate of 8.27%. These services are all provided by lenders who hold collateral and independently determine credit eligibility. Overseas, India's Reserve Bank's Liberalised Remittance Scheme explicitly restricts overseas speculative trading, resulting in Vested Finance offering only cash accounts, while Interactive Brokers' India branch prohibits domestic residents from participating in overseas margin products, leaving many overseas investors unable to use their holdings for financing.
Tokenization fundamentally restructures asset utility. Take an Indian investor as an example: if they hold $20,000 worth of NVIDIA stock through a platform, under the traditional model they can only trade it but cannot pledge it for loans, resulting in asset utility far lower than that of US-based holders. Although Interactive Brokers opened services to clients in multiple countries in Q3 2026 with an average margin loan yield of 4.25%, and Nigerian retail investment app Trove launched 2x leverage on US stocks in August, the widespread minimum asset thresholds and cumbersome paperwork still pose obstacles. Tokenization deposits collateral assets into users' own wallets, and any lending protocol that recognizes the token can accept it as collateral, thereby achieving global asset revitalization.
Platforms differ significantly in their collateral haircut rates and liquidation thresholds, reflecting different risk management logics. Kraken has supported 10 xStock tokens as futures and margin collateral since July 3, with index-tracking instruments like SPYx subject to a 10% haircut, individual stocks like NVIDIA subject to a 20% haircut, and highly volatile individual stocks like Robinhood itself subject to a 30% haircut. Aave supports users pledging 7 Coinbase stock tokens to borrow USDC, with Microsoft having a maximum pledge rate of 79%, NVIDIA 70%, and Tesla and Meta 65%. Notably, Aave's collateral factor range is 65% to 79%, with liquidation lines set above this range, and this gap serves as a buffer for weekend price gaps. Paboxo launched on Robinhood Chain on October 19, with Morpho following suit, setting liquidation thresholds at 62.5% for NVIDIA and 77% for SPY, with the first batch also including SpaceX tokens, Apple and Tesla (both at 62.5%), and Alphabet (also at 77%), with indices enjoying more lenient liquidation conditions due to lower volatility.
Woofun AI's compiled data reveals that user growth data highlights the influx of new users and the transformation of the gatekeeper role. As of October 18, wallet addresses initiating borrowing on Aave surged from 8 to 144, with three-quarters of these addresses having never used Aave on the Base chain before. LlamaRisk, responsible for setting risk parameters, found that the vast majority of borrowing activity occurred during stock market closure hours, with these new users completing borrowings precisely during time windows when traditional brokerages cannot provide services. However, issuers still control the access gate: both Robinhood and Coinbase stock tokens are prohibited from being sold to US residents. Additionally, holder rights are limited 鈥?Robinhood stock tokens are issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited as debt securities, and holders have no legal claim to the underlying company; Coinbase stock tokens are certificated by special-purpose vehicles, with dividends reinvested rather than directly distributed.
On top of lending, four categories of derivative application scenarios have rapidly emerged, creating returns for different participants. The first is direct access to cash 鈥?Aave founder Stani Kulechov noted that its stock token lending market interest rate is approximately 5%, higher than Interactive Brokers, but the advantage lies in no minimum asset threshold and ability to disburse on Saturdays. The second is leveraged trading 鈥?Pendle's PendleLoop allows users to borrow USDC on Aave and then cyclically buy similar tokens, establishing 2.6鈥?.2x leveraged exposure with one click, with no fees until December 31, far exceeding the typical 2x leverage cap of US retail margin accounts. The third is trading margin 鈥?Kraken supports xStock tokens as margin for futures positions, with individual instrument limits ranging from $100,000 to $1 million; as of September, over 300,000 users held xStocks, and users can use Apple token positions to participate in Bitcoin futures trading. The fourth is fund pool connectivity 鈥?eligible users can lend USDG through Robinhood Earn in Morpho vaults operated by Steakhouse Financial. This week, approximately 75,000 wallets deposited funds into this vault, with total scale reaching $543.6 million; Steakhouse has approved funds for deployment into Robinhood stock token pledge loans, with a cap of 1 million USDG per lending market. It should be noted that the country restrictions on the lending side and borrowing side are not the same: stock tokens themselves are still prohibited from being sold to US residents, but USDG lenders are not restricted on this basis.
The value chain profit distribution presents a multi-layered structure. Issuers sit at the top of the value chain 鈥?Robinhood not only issues stock tokens, operates a public chain, but also controls a savings app, profiting from float, as Paxos distributes USDG reserve yields to Global Dollar Network partners; Coinbase replicates this model on the Base chain, while Kraken controls Backed (the xStocks issuing entity). Wrapping layers like Pendle do not lend but route borrowing demand to Aave. Lending protocols earn interest spreads, but current returns are meager: Aave's stock token lending market has a borrowing cap of $21 million; if fully utilized at a 5% interest rate, annual interest would be approximately $1 million, most of which goes to lenders. Vault managers and risk control agencies charge service fees 鈥?Steakhouse determines the deployment direction of the $543 million savings pool, and LlamaRisk stipulates that Aave liquidators can enjoy up to a 5.5% discount when disposing of collateral. Chainlink controls pricing power, providing price data sources for Coinbase and Robinhood tokens, determining when prices update and freeze.
Market size comparisons and the weekend pricing loophole risk highlight the industry's potential crisis. As of end-September, Interactive Brokers' client margin loan scale reached $105.2 billion, with quarterly net interest income of $1.15 billion; US margin debt reached $1.48 trillion in September. In comparison, Aave's stock token market borrowing scale was only $4.08 million as of October 18, equivalent to just 0.004% of Interactive Brokers' credit book. All loans depend on real-time collateral value, but Chainlink's stock price oracle updates from 8 PM New York time on Sunday to 8 PM Friday, with prices frozen on weekends. This creates an arbitrage loophole: borrowers can borrow the full amount on Saturday at Friday prices, anticipating a decline at the open, causing collateral value to fall below the loan principal. If relying on on-chain weekend trading for pricing, it faces thin liquidity issues 鈥?Aave estimates that selling just $300,000 to $1.1 million of stock tokens on the Base chain can cause a 2% price movement, easily manipulated to trigger liquidations. On July 28, 2026, a single-share trade of SK Hynix occurred during pre-market hours on Korean alternative trading platform Nextrade, with a price 30% below the previous close. The oracle fed this anomalous price into a Hyperliquid contract deployed by Trade.xyz under the HIP-3 framework 鈥?which tracks Seoul common shares rather than the Nasdaq ADR listed on July 10 鈥?directly liquidating 960 accounts involving $57.4 million in positions and approximately $17.3 million in realized losses, even though the stock price subsequently recovered.
The limitations of oracles determine the inevitability of risk premiums. Even without arbitrageurs, the time gap itself constitutes risk, with an entire weekend's market movements updating all at once on Sunday evening. In January 2025, DeepSeek-related news emerged over the weekend, and NVIDIA briefly fell 17% before rebounding; a user with a 60% pledge rate (Aave cap of 70%) would have been liquidated all at once before the price recovered. Lenders are attempting to respond: Paboxo suspends liquidations during traditional market closures, deferring risk to the open; Jupiter's Offerbook offers 1鈥?0 day term loans without price-based liquidation mechanisms, pricing risk premiums into interest rates. Starting December 6, Nasdaq and NYSE Arca will implement trading five days a week, 23 hours a day, narrowing overnight pricing gaps, but weekends will still have no official quotes. Lenders will ultimately factor unobservable risk into collateral haircut rates, and the lendable ratio of tokenized stocks will necessarily be lower than native stocks, but for users who cannot access traditional brokerage services, this remains the only financing channel.
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