Coinbase Tokenized Stock (Coinbase Onchain SPV, Base)

Research, firm shelf, model-client eligibility, and advisor selection are recorded separately. The scheduled date is the outside bound; new evidence can reopen the file sooner.

Coinbase’s tokenized stocks are certificates, not shares, and Coinbase will not sell them to Americans. The issuer is Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd, a company formed in Abu Dhabi’s financial free zone on 17 June 2026 and owned, through one holding company, by Coinbase Global. The ADGM regulator approved one prospectus per stock: NVIDIA, Meta, Apple and Alphabet on 4 August 2026, and six more, from Amazon to SpaceX, on 3 September. Each token is a B20 token on Base, Coinbase’s own chain. The legal form is the custodial one. Alpaca Securities, a US broker-dealer, holds the shares in the SPV’s name, and the SPV holds them on trust; each token is ”a pro rata beneficial interest” in that pool. The catch is who counts as a holder. The record of title is a Legal Register kept by another Coinbase company, Onchain Marketplace Ltd, and a person who buys the token on chain is not on it. They are an ”Unvested Holder”: the SPV is the registered owner and holds for them as bare trustee, and they may not redeem or instruct a vote until they pass Coinbase’s checks. For a US advisor’s client the answer is no. The prospectus says the certificates ”MAY NOT BE ACQUIRED, HELD, OFFERED, SOLD” in the United States or to a US person. On chain, one address with no code holds the admin role on the contracts we read, and B20 gives that role the power to block any address and burn its balance.

Research triggers: events that reopen the assessment or shelf decision
• Coinbase opens the certificates to US persons, or files a US-registered offering of them
• The admin key grants the burn-blocked or pause role, or blocks a holder
• Coinbase changes the vesting conditions or cancels unvested positions
• Custody moves from Alpaca, or the trust is challenged in an insolvency

The research file

Who issues the tokens

Every prospectus names Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd, ADGM company 37941, as issuer. Its sole shareholder is Onchain Marketplace Holdings Ltd, ”a wholly owned subsidiary of Coinbase.” A sister company, Onchain Marketplace Ltd, is authorised by the ADGM regulator as a central securities depository; it acts as Tokenisation Entity, mints and burns, runs the freeze and pause, and keeps the Legal Register. Alpaca Securities LLC is custodian and broker, and Coinbase Custody International lends the SPV its running costs. Only Authorised Participants, professional firms approved by the issuer, create new tokens, at a fee of 0.01%.

The tokens are listed, with their prospectuses, on base.org/stocks, and the contract addresses there answer to the right names on chain. The ten listed are NVIDIA, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, SpaceX, Sandisk, Strategy and Tesla. CoinGecko shows each worth $1 million to $4 million on 23 September 2026, about $20 million in all. News reports of Coinbase, Circle and Intel tokens have no prospectus and no listing behind them, and the file leaves them out.

What a holder owns, and when

Each certificate is, in the prospectus’s words, ”a pro rata beneficial interest in the Deposited Property” held by the issuer on trust, and ”The Securities do not constitute direct investments in the Underlying.” Dividends are not paid out. Alpaca receives them, the SPV takes a 5% fee and 30% US withholding comes off, and the rest buys more shares, which shows up as a rising multiplier on the token. There is no vote; a Vested Holder may send voting instructions that the SPV may try to follow.

The prospectus splits holders in two. A Vested Holder has passed the Tokenisation Entity’s compliance checks, proved control of the wallet and nominated a bank account, and is entered on the Legal Register. An Unvested Holder, which is anyone who bought on a decentralized exchange and has not done those things, is not. ”The Issuer is recorded as the Registered Owner of Unvested Securities, which it holds as bare trustee” for them. That holder has an economic interest and nothing to exercise it with: ”Unvested Holders shall not be entitled to redeem Securities or withdraw Underlying.” The prospectus warns that a change in the vesting conditions, even after a holder has vested, ”may result in the freezing or confiscation” of the certificates, and that the trust itself could be challenged if the SPV fails.

Who may hold, and how a holder gets out

The sales restriction is absolute: the certificates may not be ”ACQUIRED, HELD, OFFERED, SOLD, RESOLD, TRANSFERRED, DELIVERED, OR OTHERWISE MADE AVAILABLE, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN THE U.S.” or to a US person as Regulation S defines one. Sanctioned persons, embargoed countries and FATF call-for-action jurisdictions are barred too. Base’s listing page says the tokens are ”Available only in eligible jurisdictions outside the US,” and publishes no country list. There is no minimum; tokens trade in fractions.

A Vested Holder redeems through Onchain Marketplace Ltd and chooses shares sent to a brokerage account, dollars, or USDC, for a fee of 0.05%. No timeframe is promised. Everyone else can only sell on a decentralized exchange on Base, into whatever liquidity the Authorised Participants provide.

Control on chain

B20 tokens are not contracts in the usual sense. Base runs them as precompiles, code built into the chain, so the issuer cannot upgrade a token; Base can. Its Cobalt upgrade, due on mainnet on 30 September 2026, adds seizeWithMemo, which moves a holder’s balance to any address in one admin call, and deprecates burnBlocked. What the issuer controls is roles. The DEFAULT_ADMIN_ROLE can grant every other role and point each transfer scope at any allowlist or blocklist in Base’s PolicyRegistry; the BURN_BLOCKED_ROLE burns the balance of any address the sender policy blocks. That is a freeze and a clawback in two transactions.

On 23 September 2026 the admin role on NVDAc and TSLAc was held by 0x38467be0…, an address with no code: one private key, as far as the chain shows. A second plain address holds the operator and metadata roles, and a proxy contract holds mint and burn. No address held the pause or burn-blocked roles that day; the admin can grant them at will. The prospectus says the same thing in words: ”blacklist, freeze, and pause functions operable by the Tokenisation Entity” that ”operate without requiring counterparty cooperation.”

Against bStocks and xStocks

Coinbase copied Binance’s structure closely. bStocks are also ADGM certificates over shares held in trust at Alpaca, also barred to US persons, also recorded off chain by an exchange-owned depository. The differences are the chain and the gate. bStocks live on BNB Chain and a token taken off Binance must be delivered back before redemption; Coinbase tokens live on Base and anyone may trade them, but only a vested holder owns anything the register will recognise. xStocks, by contrast, are debt notes of a Jersey issuer, not trust interests. For a client outside the United States the Coinbase form is the cleaner claim of the three; for a US client none of them is available.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

• Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd, Prospectus for NVIDIA certificates (FSRA approved 4 August 2026) · primary · accessed 2026-09-23
  Supports: issuer and group, trust interest; not a direct investment, Legal Register; vested and unvested holders, bare trust, Reg S bar, Authorised Participants; no minimum, fees and dividends, freeze, pause, blacklist, cancel, trust challenge risk
• Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd, Prospectus for Tesla certificates (FSRA approved 3 September 2026) · primary · accessed 2026-09-23
  Supports: same terms as NVIDIA, second batch of six
• Base: Stocks on Base · primary · accessed 2026-09-23
  Supports: ten listed tickers and addresses, outside the US only
• Base: B20 Native Token Standard (Beryl specification) · primary · accessed 2026-09-23
  Supports: precompile tokens, roles, policy registry, burnBlocked
• Base: B20 tokenized stocks on Base (engineering blog) · primary · accessed 2026-09-23
  Supports: seize role, multiplier, verified asset list
• Base mainnet eth_call reads of hasRole() on NVDAc and TSLAc · primary · accessed 2026-09-23
  Supports: admin 0x38467be00970af18076fd08f6b4cf38ba91572b1 has no code, no pause or burn-blocked holder
• CoinGecko: NVIDIA (Coinbase Tokenized Stock) · secondary · accessed 2026-09-23
  Supports: market capitalization

Inherited controls

The research above describes the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The most administered layer sets the position’s effective control grade; that is a control description, not a quality or suitability score.