Stocks as Margin? Bitget Model Says Traders Can Halve Their Skin in the Game 📉

Crypto exchange Bitget and digital asset research firm Block Scholes published a report on October 7, 2026, testing the effect of using tokenized stocks as security deposits for crypto trades. In a modeled $1 million portfolio, the study found that tokenized stock collateral reduced the capital a trader had to post from about $340,000 to about $175,000, a roughly 50% drop. The same report, however, showed that the combined setup was liquidated more easily when equities and digital assets fell together.

The modeled portfolio held $175,000 of tokenized AI and semiconductor stocks alongside BTC and ETH perpetual positions and a short position on a Nasdaq-100 ETF perpetual. Under the first scenario, the stocks and the crypto trades sat in separate accounts, with crypto margins funded independently, bringing total capital deployed to about $340,000. In the second scenario, Bitget's Cross-Asset Unified Account counted the tokenized stocks as the safety deposit for the crypto positions, removing the need for a separate USDT margin and reducing the deployed capital to roughly $175,000.

The liquidation threshold also shifted. The report stated that the stock-backed portfolio was liquidated at a 21% drop versus 27% with USDT, meaning positions could be closed automatically at a shallower market decline when tokenized stocks and crypto perpetuals shared the same margin pool. The study additionally documented the historical relationship between Bitcoin and U.S. tech equities, recording an average Bitcoin–Nasdaq-100 correlation of +0.41 since 2022 and a peak of +0.75, a linkage the authors used to justify treating tokenized equity exposure and crypto perpetuals as related risk factors within a single account.

Bitget and Block Scholes framed the findings as a measurement of capital efficiency under specific modeled assumptions rather than as a recommendation, and the report did not include direct quotes from executives. The two firms have not disclosed any plans to extend the unified-account model to additional asset classes beyond the AI, semiconductor, $BTC, $ETH and Nasdaq-100 ETF perpetuals used in the test.