Crypto Platforms Target Traditional Trades
The line between traditional and decentralised finance has been blurring for some time. Recent developments are set to make it even harder to see, as three of the major crypto trading platforms offer products that were once the preserve of conventional brokerage firms.
Kraken’s announcement of a move into perpetual futures for tokenised stocks for non-US clients in late February enables 24/7 trading of equity price exposure with up to 20 times leverage, allowing for long and short positions and capital efficiency.
The initial listings include perpetual futures tracking tokenised versions of some of the world’s most widely followed equity indices, commodities, and publicly traded companies.
Perpetual futures have been described as the missing link in tokenised equities, facilitating continuous trading without expiry and using funding rates to keep prices aligned with spot markets.
Read more: Kraken’s xStocks Hits $25 Billion in Tokenized Trades in Under Eight Months
Almost at the same time, Coinbase made stock trading fully available to all its US-based users, allowing them to buy, sell, and manage stocks and ETFs alongside their crypto holdings.
Adding stocks and ETFs to its range of products has been described as a way of providing existing users with more options for staying active on the platform, while at the same time positioning Coinbase as a potential alternative to multi-asset trading apps that already combine traditional and decentralised financial instruments.
Should this move lead to increased trading volumes among current customers and draw in equity-focused investors seeking access to cryptocurrency, it will boost Coinbase’s options for generating transaction and subscription revenue in the longer term.
Furthermore, supporting stock and ETF trading aligns with the company’s aim to offer institutional stablecoin payments and custody services and indicates a wider effort to establish itself as core infrastructure for both digital and traditional assets.
At the same time, Binance reintroduced tokenised US stock trading through a partnership with Ondo Finance, offering a limited number of blockchain-based tokens for assets including Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia. These tokens trade on Binance Alpha within the Binance Web3 wallet, providing round-the-clock exposure to equities, mainly for non-US users.
The exchange had previously withdrawn its tokenised stock offering in 2021 amid regulatory concerns. It will be hoping that the latest version of the service will live up to Fortune’s billing as the next big thing in crypto.
[#highlighted-links#]
Passive Approach Pays Off
With investor numbers rising in many key markets and demand for ETFs continuing to grow, many investment firms have been keen to promote the merits of active investment management.
In this context, Morningstar’s latest European active/passive barometer (which measured the performance of active funds against their passive counterparts in the second half of last year) will have made uncomfortable reading for active managers.
Despite the normalisation of monetary policy and volatility in credit risk giving active bond managers plenty of levers to pull, passive funds had the upper hand in 2025. The one-year success rate of active managers in the eurozone large-cap equity 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, over the 10-year period to the end of 2025, the success rate was just 3.8%.
One reason to be growing more cautious here on European equities? Despite it’s relative discount to U.S. equities, Europe on a nominal level is trading at the 84th percentile of its historical valuation range. pic.twitter.com/sXTwo5NmOa
— Blake Millard, CFA (@BlakeMillardCFA) March 12, 2026
Government bonds remain the area in fixed income where an active approach is more at risk of underperforming passive peers over long periods. Success rates in the investment-grade corporate bond segment tend to decrease over time due to the impact of higher fees compared with passive peers, although not to the same extent as seen in the government bond categories.
The report found that active managers tend to achieve higher success rates only within mid- and small-cap equity categories or where the average passive counterpart shows a structural bias towards a particular economic sector or is concentrated on a few individual names.
Read more: Saxo Bank Japan Broadens European Stock Offering, Including UBS and Ferrari
Spreading the Load
After a few years in the doldrums, multi-asset strategies have enjoyed something of a recovery over the last 12 months.
The rationale behind multi-asset investment is simple – if your portfolio contains a mix of property, investment-grade and high-yield credit, commodities, and other alternatives in addition to equities and bonds, diversification will smooth out returns over time.
Bloomberg data indicates that this approach worked well for investors in four of the five major periods of market turmoil since 2000 (the dotcom crash, the global financial crisis, Covid, the 2022 inflation shock, and liberation day).
Only in 2022 did multi-asset investments fail to deliver positive returns, although losses were still lower than for global equities or a 60–40 global equities/UK gilts strategy.
According to Christopher Mahon, head of dynamic real return, multi-asset, at Columbia Threadneedle, and his colleague, multi-asset fund manager Ben Rodriguez, the disappointment of 2022 is unlikely to happen again.
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 Trump’s large trade tariffs, where they fell less than equity funds and recovered more quickly.
The current generation of central bankers has rejected the zero interest rate approach, with the result that government bond yields are now not only normal but quite attractive at levels previously seen in 2000. This is the same level as when the classic multi-asset diversification strategy was developed and went on to have 15–20 years of success.
Mahon and Rodriguez believe diversification is back. Downside protection is once again possible, and the rise in yields is not limited to government bonds, with many asset classes seeing the same effect.
