How xStocks actually work: from real-world asset to TON jetton

In this article, you’ll see what really happens between a familiar ticker from traditional markets and the xStock that ends up in your TON wallet. We’ll walk through who issues these instruments, who holds the underlying assets, how the “1:1 backing” idea works in practice, how it all becomes a standard jetton on TON, and what that means for you as a DeFi user.

💡 xStocks are on-chain instruments on TON that mirror the value of selected traditional market assets. They’re described as being backed one-to-one by real positions in the classic financial system, held with regulated custody partners, while you hold the on-chain representation directly in your TON wallet.

From your side on STON.fi:

• you connect a TON wallet
• you swap into an xStock on STON.fi
• the resulting jetton appears in your balance within seconds and stays under your own keys, 24/7

Everything else is machinery behind that simple experience.

How it’s structured under the hood

Underneath the interface there’s a fairly standard stack. Simplified, it looks like this:

1. Underlying asset
   Someone picks a reference asset from traditional markets: a large issuer, a broad market basket, a sector basket, a short-term yield instrument, etc.
2. Issuer
   Backed Finance creates a regulated product that follows the value of this underlying asset and is fully collateralized by it. Think of it as a wrapper that ties one unit of exposure to a specific slice of real-world holdings.
3. Custodian
   The actual instruments sit in accounts at a licensed custody bank in Switzerland. The custodian is responsible for safekeeping under local regulation; Backed is responsible for the product design and lifecycle.
4. On-chain representation
   Backed mints blockchain tokens (bTokens) that correspond to units of that product. These live first on an EVM chain, but are designed from day one to be moved into DeFi.

So from bottom to top you get:

Traditional asset → regulated product → bToken on an origin chain → wrapped representation on TON → xStock jetton you see in your wallet

STON.fi technically integrates the last step. It does not issue the product, does not hold the legacy instruments, and does not run the custody; it surfaces the on-chain jetton and routes swaps around it.

How value and backing stay in sync

Two things have to line up for this to be meaningful:

1. Economic value — the on-chain unit has to move in line with the underlying market.
2. Collateral — there has to be enough real-world backing to cover all issued units.

Price references

Backed uses independent price feeds for the underlyings so that DeFi protocols don’t rely on manual inputs or one data source. In practice that means:

• Prices are aggregated from multiple traditional venues
• An oracle network pushes those prices on-chain at regular intervals
• Smart contracts can read those values when quoting swaps, enforcing limits, or running strategies

You don’t need to know which node operator did what; the important point is that price data is not coming from a single HTTP endpoint someone can quietly edit.

Proof of reserves

Backing is checked via a separate mechanism:

• Backed and its custodian maintain the off-chain positions that are supposed to back the tokens
• An independent auditor has read-only access to the relevant accounts and internal numbers
• Those reserve figures are pushed into a dedicated on-chain feed (proof-of-reserves)
• Anyone integrating xStocks can compare “tokens in circulation” vs “real-world backing” programmatically

If reserves ever drift below what they should be, protocols that respect these feeds can pause integrations or adjust their behavior automatically. It doesn’t remove all trust, but it makes failures harder to hide and easier to react to.

How a bToken becomes a TON jetton

The mapping from “Backed token on an origin chain” to “xStock jetton on TON” is a standard bridging and wrapping story:

• A bridge locks or escrows the original bToken on its native network
• In response, it mints a corresponding representation on TON
• On TON, that representation is implemented as a Jetton (the fungible TON-token standard), with:
  • a master contract that defines the asset
  • per-user jetton-wallet contracts that hold balances and process transfers

STON.fi then:

• Plugs that jetton into its Omniston routing engine
• Exposes it in the interface as an xStock you can swap into
• Following the swap completion, the resulting jettons are reflected in your wallet’s jetton-wallet contract 

From your point of view, you never deal with bridges or origin chains directly. You see a name and a ticker, you execute a swap, and a familiar TON-style asset appears.

Wrapping up

Put together, the pipeline looks like this:

• a conventional, regulated structure holding real-world positions
• wrapped in a tokenized layer with price feeds and reserve proofs
• mapped into TON as a standard jetton
• made accessible through a non-custodial interface you already use

You end up with traditional market exposure that behaves like any other DeFi building block in your TON wallet: you can move it, swap it, and plug it into protocols that support it, without opening a brokerage account or giving up self-custody.

⚠️ xStocks are not available to citizens or residents of the United States, any EU/EEA member state, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Belgium, or any other jurisdiction where access to tokenized securities or assets is restricted or prohibited.