Crypto platforms are targeting traditional trading
The lines between traditional finance and decentralized finance have been blurring for some time. Recent developments are making things even more difficult to see, as three of the major crypto trading platforms offer products that were once the purview of traditional brokerages.
In late February, Kraken announced the transition to perpetual futures for tokenized stocks for non-US clients, allowing for 24/7 trading of equity exposure with up to 20x leverage, enabling long and short positions and capital efficiency.
The initial listing will include perpetual futures that track tokenized versions of some of the world’s most widely followed stock indexes, commodities, and publicly traded companies.
Perpetual futures have been described as the missing link for tokenized stocks, facilitating continuous trading without expiration and allowing prices to match the spot market using funding rates.
Read more: Kraken’s xStocks hits $25 billion in tokenized transactions in less than 8 months
Around the same time, Coinbase made stock trading fully available to all US-based users, allowing them to buy, sell, and manage stocks and ETFs alongside their crypto holdings.
Adding stocks and ETFs to its product range is described as a way to give existing users more options to remain active on the platform, while also positioning Coinbase as a potential alternative to multi-asset trading apps that already combine traditional and decentralized financial products.
If this move leads to increased trading volumes for current customers and attracts equity-focused investors seeking access to cryptocurrencies, it will give Coinbase more options for generating trading and subscription revenue over the long term.
Additionally, support for stocks and ETF trading is consistent with the company’s goal of providing institutional stablecoin payments and custody services, and signals a broader effort to position itself as a core infrastructure for both digital and traditional assets.
At the same time, Binance reintroduced tokenized US stock trading through a partnership with Ondo Finance, offering a limited number of blockchain-based tokens for assets such as Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia. These tokens are traded on Binance Alpha within the Binance Web3 wallet, providing 24-hour exposure to stocks primarily for users outside the US.
The exchange had previously halted tokenized stock offerings in 2021, citing regulatory concerns. The company will be hoping that the latest version of its service lives up to Fortune’s billing as the next big thing in the crypto space.
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A passive approach works
As the number of investors in many major markets increases and demand for ETFs continues to grow, many investment firms are becoming more eager to promote the benefits of active investment management.
In this context, Morningstar’s latest European Active/Passive Barometer, which measures the performance of active funds relative to passive funds in the second half of last year, will make unpleasant readings for active managers.
Passive funds dominated in 2025, even though the normalization of monetary policy and changes in credit risk have given active fixed income managers more leverage. The one-year success rate for active managers in the Eurozone large-cap category was 17.3% at the end of last year, down from 23.2% in June 2025, but slightly up from 15% at the end of 2024.
However, the success rate over the 10 years ending in 2025 was only 3.8%.
What’s one of the reasons we’re being more cautious about European stocks here? Despite being relatively cheap compared to US stocks, European stocks trade at the 84th percentile of their historical valuation range at a nominal level. pic.twitter.com/sXTwo5NmOa
— Blake Millard, CFA (@BlakeMillardCFA) March 12, 2026
In the fixed income space, we still have government bonds, where an active approach carries a higher risk of underperformance over a passive approach over the long term. Closing rates in the investment grade corporate bond segment, while not as high as those seen in the government bond category, tend to decline over time due to the impact of higher fees relative to passive peers.
The report found that active managers tend to achieve higher success rates only within the small- and mid-cap category, or where the average passive manager exhibits a structural bias toward a particular economic sector or is concentrated in a small number of stocks.
Read more: Saxo Bank Japan expands European stock offering including UBS and Ferrari
Balance the load
After several years of decline, multi-asset strategies have seen a slight recovery over the past 12 months.
The rationale behind multi-asset investing is simple. If your portfolio includes a mix of stocks and bonds, as well as real estate, investment grade, high-yield credit, commodities, and other alternatives, diversification will smooth out your returns over time.
Bloomberg data shows this approach has worked well for investors in four of the five major periods of market turmoil since 2000: the dot-com crash, the global financial crisis, the coronavirus, the 2022 inflation shock, and Liberation Day.
For the first time in 2022, multi-asset investing failed to achieve positive returns, but losses were still lower than global equities and global equities/UK government bonds 60/40 strategies.
The disappointment of 2022 is unlikely to repeat itself, according to Christopher Mahon, head of multi-asset dynamic real returns at Columbia Threadneedle, and his colleague, multi-asset fund manager Ben Rodriguez.
Their view that the balance between risk and return is better now than it was four years ago is based in part on the performance of multi-asset funds after President Trump’s massive trade tariffs, with multi-asset funds falling less and recovering faster than equity funds.
The current generation of central bankers has rejected the zero interest rate approach, and as a result, government bond yields are now not only normal, but very attractive at levels previously seen in 2000. This is the same level at which classic multi-asset diversification strategies were developed and used successfully for 15 to 20 years.
Mahon and Rodriguez believe diversification is back. With downside protection once again available, the rise in yields is not limited to government bonds, with similar effects seen across many asset classes.
