3 Surprising Truths About the Hidden $10 Billion Stock Lending Market

Trends

Nov 26,2025

By Joshua

Introduction: From Vision to Fine Print

The Planck Network website paints an exciting picture: a project building the world’s first Layer-0 for AI, combining decentralized infrastructure with high-performance GPU computing. Its stated goal is to become “The New Industry Standard of Decentralized AI.” The vision is ambitious, backed by impressive traction and partnerships.

But savvy participants know the real story isn’t just in the vision—it’s in the legal architecture and risk disclosures that underpin it. What details are found in the dense, 41-page legal whitepaper—a document few will ever read in its entirety? We did the reading for you. Our goal is to distill the most surprising and impactful takeaways from the formal document into a clear, scannable list. Here’s what you really need to know.

1. A $10 Billion Revenue Stream Is Captured by Middlemen—And You Fund It

The fundamental asymmetry of the current stock lending system is that while brokers facilitate the lending of your assets, their operations are designed to capture the vast majority of the profit. The scale of this value capture is staggering, built on an opaque and outdated financial infrastructure.

The numbers reveal a system engineered to keep asset owners on the sidelines:

• ~$10.3 Billion Rent Skimmed: In 2024 alone, this is the annual spread harvested by intermediaries in the stock lending market.

• $3.5 Trillion Rehypothecated: This is the value of global equities that are cycled through broker balance sheets each year.

• Owner Share ≈ 0%: Asset holders fund the entire trade, yet it is the middlemen who book the cashflow—a stark illustration of the value leakage inherent in legacy financial plumbing.

In essence, the system functions like a conveyor belt where asset holders place their valuable goods, only to watch intermediaries at the other end collect all the payment.

This system is built on “fax-era plumbing,” where layered desks confiscate rent under opaque agreements. The tangible consequences of this outdated infrastructure are significant, leading to settlement delays, increased counterparty risk, and a complete lack of transparency that benefits facilitators rather than the true asset owners.

The custody agreements you click through let brokers rehypothecate your assets, pocket the spread, and bury the disclosure.

2. The Shift Isn’t a Prediction—It’s Already Happening

The idea of reclaiming this lost revenue isn’t a futuristic prediction; it is an inevitable transformation driven by three powerful market forces converging at once. The move to a more transparent, onchain system is already underway.

These are the primary catalysts driving the change:

1. Tokenization Goes Mainstream:

Public companies, banks, and asset issuers are actively mapping securities to onchain primitives. As they do, they are demanding financial venues that can clear, price, and report natively onchain.

2. Wallets Expect Yield:

Crypto-native investors are already accustomed to transparent APY, instant liquidity, and composability. They will migrate their assets the moment traditional securities markets can offer the same onchain benefits.

3. Balance Sheets Need Income:

Treasury departments and broker desks are under constant pressure to unlock new revenue streams. Tokenized equities with real-time settlement enable new, attractive trading strategies—like basis, hedge, and short-cover trades—that they cannot afford to ignore.

This isn’t just a technological push; it’s a pincer movement where institutional demand for onchain rails is met by a crypto-native user base that will settle for nothing less, creating an inescapable pressure for the market to evolve.

3. The Future of Investing is a 24/7 Market Where Your Portfolio Never Sleeps

Perhaps the most tangible and counter-intuitive benefit of this technological shift is the end of the traditional 9-to-5 market clock for asset productivity.

Onchain rails and smart contracts enable continuous, autonomous settlement. This stands in stark contrast to traditional markets that “clock out at 4 p.m.” In this new model, portfolios can earn and rebalance every hour of every day of the week, leading to profound effects on market structure and efficiency.

• Borrow Costs Compress: When all lendable shares are gathered in a single transparent pool, true competition emerges. This forces borrowing rates to be set by actual supply and demand, not by opaque quotes from a broker’s desk.

• Idle Collateral Activates: Dormant stock inventory sitting in portfolios can be turned into productive, yield-generating assets, expanding market liquidity without adding hidden layers of leverage.

This creates a fundamentally more efficient market where assets are always working, and the value they generate flows directly to their owners. “[Onchain systems keep] collateral, credit, and cash cycling 24/7 so your portfolio never sleeps.”

Conclusion: The Rent Is Coming Home

The truths of the stock lending market are surprising but simple: a massive, hidden revenue stream exists; the technological and market forces to redirect that stream are already here; and the result is a more efficient, 24/7 market where asset owners are finally rewarded.

As neutral, onchain infrastructure becomes the new standard, it is routing value back to the participants who create it in the first place.

As your portfolio gains the ability to earn 24/7, the critical question shifts from if you’ll participate to how you’ll recalibrate your entire investment strategy around truly productive assets.

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