The direct connection to the US stock market is heating up: How Atomic Vaults helps exchanges launch one-stop US stock services

SpaceX's century IPO attracted over $1 billion in tokenized US stock subscription demand, but the delivery was a disaster due to the underlying service provider's failure to secure any shares. This $1 billion "on-chain rush" ultimately ended in a farce of canceled subscriptions and full refunds, completely tearing away the illusion of certain infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the product data in the real US stock market continued to grow steadily:

·February: Bit (formerly Matrixport) launched real US stock trading, attracting over 10,000 users in just one weekend, and within three weeks, the assets under management (AUM) surpassed $200 million.

·May: MEXC (Matcha) introduced the "real stocks" feature, allowing users to trade over 10,000 US stock assets and ETFs directly on a crypto-native platform.

·June, on the day of the SpaceX IPO: While most platforms in the tokenized stock ecosystem were busy explaining why shares were canceled and stocks were absent, Backpack's SpaceX stock trading progressed smoothly without any issues and received praise from the community for its professionalism.

Different platforms, different regions, different user groups. Yet they share the same backend.

The core link connecting these three platforms is Atomic Vaults Securities (abbreviated as "AVS"). This is a US securities broker regulated by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), quietly providing real US stock trading power for major digital asset platforms behind the scenes.

Say goodbye to "wrapped assets" (Wrappers), and welcome "native rails" (Rails).

For decades, founding a fully licensed securities brokerage has been one of the most challenging projects in the financial services industry. The span from a broker starting from scratch to being fully operational has traditionally been measured in "years," not "weeks," due to the complexities of compliance approvals, market connections, clearing relationships, custody arrangements, operational controls, corporate behavior handling, tax filings, and dozens of other intricate processes.

Atomic Vaults has completely changed this industry status quo. By productizing the entire brokerage business technology stack, AVS enables digital asset platforms, fintech companies, wallets, and exchanges to launch regulated access to the global securities market in as little as 45 days. What once took years of negotiations, engineering development, compliance reviews, and infrastructure construction can now be completed through a single institutional partnership. Exchanges will say goodbye to those asset custody chains filled with single points of failure and counterparty risk traps, making tokenized stocks untrustworthy… and welcome direct and regulated access to real stocks.

Just imagine what this means: A crypto exchange can leap from zero securities infrastructure to a fully operational global securities brokerage service provider in just 45 days. In January 2026, the industry's question was still: "Do users want tokenized assets, or do they want the assets themselves?" By June, the question had changed to: "Can you go live in 45 days? Can you do it in 30 days??"

Because if you can, you're in the race; if you can't, you can only watch from the sidelines.

Industry first: Pioneering a new institutional capital channel, replacing bank wire transfers with stablecoins.

To accelerate the speed of capital flow, AVS has launched stablecoin deposit infrastructure for its institutional partners. This service operates through Atomic Vaults TSS LLC (the MSB licensed entity under AVS) and aims to connect the liquidity of digital assets with regulated capital markets, allowing clients to achieve near real-time, seamless capital injection into US securities accounts via stablecoins.

Traditional cross-border bank wire transfers have long faced pain points such as slow speed, limitations on bank operating hours, and high costs, severely restricting global investors' access to US stocks. The launch of this infrastructure effectively addresses this pain point, significantly enhancing the capital efficiency of global brokers, exchanges, and asset management companies.

( AVS stablecoin flowchart )

Team background: Top traders and network security experts, not traditional financial elites in suits.

In the "new world" after 2020, a hardcore business paradigm has been continuously self-replicating: some explosive growth unicorn companies suddenly appeared and achieved billions of dollars in market value within just a few months. They share a common underlying logic: the teams are born from a small number of "math geniuses" and foundational architects forming a spiritual tribe. These individuals won Olympic competition medals in their childhood and built complex quantitative trading systems in their twenties. Or they created an integrated network security defense matrix, then hid in a small office, focused on creating their own disruptive products. Hyperliquid, Deepseek, Cursor, Anthropic… different tracks, but the script is the same.

Atomic Vaults Inc is another rising Silicon Valley-style legend.

The company perfectly continues this founding gene of "extreme performance" and "military-grade network security." Today, the team handles over $15 billion in trading volume each month with fewer than 15 employees. This means each employee processes over $1 billion in trading activity on average each month. After successfully empowering leading internet brokerage giants in Asia, they are further expanding this dimensionality-reducing business landscape to mainstream global digital asset exchanges.

Founders Ming Zhao (X account: @fabiusmercurius) and Bonny Jain both come from the world's top quantitative trading sanctuaries, with backgrounds spanning Point72, Jane Street, and HRT (Hudson River Trading) — in these top quantitative hedge funds, milliseconds determine life and death, and risks are calculated in real-time. Understanding the security vulnerabilities at the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance, the team has injected top-tier network security defense mechanisms into the underlying system architecture, ensuring asset clearing, API connections, and cross-chain capital flows have impeccable attack resistance. The system must demonstrate absolute immunity and high concurrency performance even under extreme market conditions and harsh cybersecurity threats.

( Note: Atomic Vaults founder Ming Zhao at the Token2049 roundtable forum, second from the right)

Their advisory team includes the former CEO of Citadel Securities and the tenth founding employee of Robinhood, and they have received investments from Founder's Fund and Ark Invest. They did not bring the outdated traditional brokerage mindset into the crypto space but instead brought an absolute trader faith: to digitize and automate everything, to ruthlessly crush all trading friction with ironclad network security, and to conduct rapid scalable expansion.