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About $5 billion has cleared through Alpaca's Instant Tokenization Network in its first year. Arush Sehgal, Head of Digital Assets at Alpaca, told The Rollup that the product is the brokerage's fastest-growing ever.
Most of the growth in tokenized stocks so far has come in perpetual futures, contracts that track a share price without holding the share. Arush said the harder and more important job is the plumbing underneath the spot market, and that the industry is now moving on to it.
"We're transitioning from tokenized asset settlement and custody to tokenized asset clearing."
Arush calls himself the co-founder of the network inside Alpaca, which acts as the broker-dealer for the issuers of tokenized stocks at Kraken, Robinhood, Coinbase, Ondo and Dinari, and for the market makers who trade them.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 40 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 insights that matter.
The Rollup · Oct 28, 2026 · 40m · 31m saved
With Arush Sehgal, Head of Digital Assets at Alpaca
Key Takeaways
Tokenized stocks are moving from settlement and custody to clearing, the step that decides how much capital the system needs
About $5B has cleared through Alpaca's tokenization network in its first year
A tokenized share is not the share itself, because the company's register of owners stays the record of who owns it
Lose the token and the share still exists and can be reissued
Tokenized stock issuers pay market makers to provide liquidity, because US short-sale rules bar the crypto practice of lending them newly minted tokens
Wall Street's clearing house nets its flows down by 98%, and tokenized stocks have no equivalent yet
Crypto pre-funds every trade, like a debit card; traditional finance runs on credit
Banks are pushing toward 24/7 markets because their own executives demand it, preferring tokenized deposits to stablecoins
1. ITN Cleared $5B in Year One
Arush opened by correcting his introduction. He is Head of Digital Assets at Alpaca, not a co-founder or president of the company, but he said he co-founded the Instant Tokenization Network, or ITN.
Alpaca's tokenization network has cleared about $5 billion since its launch roughly a year ago
"We've just passed $5 billion in flows cleared through ITN." — Arush Sehgal
Alpaca launched ITN at the Token2049 conference. It is an internal clearing house that lets participants swap between ordinary shares and the various tokenized versions of them instantly, at any hour of any day.
