When CEXs Catch Old-School Envy: Kraken, Coinbase, Binance Morph into DeFi-Broker Chimeras

The once-clear line between TradFi and DeFi has officially been smudged beyond recognition by greasy fingers clutching leveraged positions. Three crypto heavyweights are now launching products that look like they were ripped straight from a boomer's Bloomberg terminal, but with a degen twist.

Kraken just unveiled perpetual futures for tokenized stocks—for everyone except Uncle Sam's watchful eye. This translates to 24/7 gambling on equity exposure with a juicy 20x leverage, letting you go long, short, or full send on capital efficiency. The first batch tracks tokenized versions of major indices, commodities, and mega-cap stocks, with the exchange touting perps as the 'missing link' for synthetic equities, using funding rates as the leash to keep prices from wandering too far from spot.

Not to be outdone, Coinbase has deployed full stock and ETF trading to its entire US user base. The play lets normies manage their boring retirement funds right next to their degenerate crypto bags, all in one app. Coinbase sells it as giving users more reasons to never leave, while also trying to out-multi-asset the other multi-asset apps. The master plan? Pump those trading volumes and maybe, just maybe, trick some equity-only tourists into taking a dip in the crypto pool.

Never one to miss a trend, Binance has re-entered the tokenized stock arena via a partnership with Ondo Finance. They're offering blockchain-based tokens for fan favorites like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia, trading inside the Binance Web3 wallet's Alpha section—again, mostly for the non-US crowd. Consider this Binance's second swing at the piñata after regulators swatted their first attempt away back in 2021.

In a deliciously ironic twist for the "experts," a recent Morningstar report served European active fund managers a plate of humble pie. Despite market chaos that should be their bread and butter, passive funds ate their lunch in 2025. The one-year success rate for active managers picking eurozone large-cap stocks crumbled to 17.3% by end-2025, down from 23.2% just months prior. Over a decade ending 2025, the success rate was a face-meltingly bad 3.8%—worse odds than a meme coin rug pull.

For those keeping score, government bonds are the fixed-income arena where paying a manager to underperform is practically a sure bet over the long run. The only places active managers sometimes don't embarrass themselves are in the mid- and small-cap equity jungles, or wherever passive funds have a built-in blind spot.

Meanwhile, after getting its teeth kicked in for a few years, the multi-asset strategy is back in vogue like cargo shorts. The logic is the same old diversification song: throw property, credit, commodities, and weird alternatives into the pot with stocks and bonds to hopefully smooth out the ride. Bloomberg data shows this kitchen-sink approach worked in four of the five major market meltdowns since 2000—only face-planting in 2022, though even then it lost less than going all-in on global equities alone.

According to Columbia Threadneedle's Christopher Mahon and Ben Rodriguez, the 2022 debacle probably isn't on repeat. They reckon the risk-reward math looks better now, partly because multi-asset funds have historically taken smaller hits and bounced back quicker than pure equity funds after tariff tantrums. With central banks finally ditching the zero-interest-rate party, government bond yields are now "normal" and actually attractive—conditions that look suspiciously like the good old days when this strategy first started printing.