Alpaca

[[PROJECT:1842]] is a developer-first brokerage infrastructure company that gives fintechs, banks, and trading platforms the regulated plumbing to offer investing without building it from scratch. Founded in 2017, the California-based firm holds FINRA registration as a broker-dealer and self-clearing firm. Its four main API products — Trading, Broker, Market Data, and Options — have accumulated over 10 million brokerage accounts across more than 400 partners in 40-plus countries, according to the company.

What the APIs Actually Do

The Trading API targets retail algorithmic traders and developers who want commission-free access to US stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies. It processes orders in 1.5 milliseconds with a claimed 99.99% uptime, and supports margin accounts, short selling (up to 4x intraday buying power), and paper trading for strategy backtesting. SDKs cover Python, Node, Go, and .NET.

The Broker API is Alpaca's primary revenue driver for institutional partners. It is a white-label brokerage infrastructure layer that handles account opening, KYC, KYB, order routing, clearing, and corporate actions. A fintech building an investing app does not need a broker-dealer license or clearing relationships — Alpaca provides both underneath. The product also includes OmniSub, a sub-accounting system for managing fractional positions and reconciliation at scale, and a Fully Paid Securities Lending program that lets partner firms earn yield on their customers' idle holdings.

The Market Data API provides real-time and historical pricing across equities and cryptocurrencies, with up to six years of historical data available. The Options API, which covers US-listed equity options with commission-free access, was moving through paper trading availability toward public launch at the time of writing.

Solana as the Settlement Chain for Tokenized US Stocks

Alpaca's most consequential infrastructure decision for the Solana ecosystem came in October 2025, when the company launched its Instant Tokenization Network (ITN) with Solana as its exclusive initial settlement chain. The ITN lets any Broker API partner issue tokenized versions of US stocks and ETFs, settled on-chain, with trades capable of clearing in USD, stablecoins including [[TOKEN:EPjFWdd5AufqSSqeM2qN1xzybapC8G4wEGGkZwyTDt1v]] and USDT, or crypto.

The underlying shares are custodied at Alpaca's DTCC-connected clearing arm. The tokenized representation lives on Solana. Partners can expose their customers to fractional ownership of US equities without moving funds to a foreign brokerage or managing cross-border wire transfers — Monetae's August 2026 launch in El Salvador, offering 70 tokenized US equities and ETFs from $5 minimums, illustrates the distribution model directly.

By December 2025, Alpaca reported holding over 94% market share in tokenized US stocks and ETFs, with more than $480 million in tokenized assets under custody. That figure reached $1.5 billion by mid-2026, according to the company.

[[PROJECT:602]] partnered with Alpaca in September 2025 to tokenize US stocks and ETFs using Alpaca's brokerage infrastructure as the underlying settlement layer, one of the early ITN integrations.

:::callout{type="data" label="Tokenized Equity Scale" source="Alpaca, mid-2026"} $1.5B+ in tokenized US equities and ETFs under custody, with Solana as the settlement chain. Alpaca reported 94% market share in this segment as of December 2025. :::

USDG and the Global Dollar Network

Also in October 2025, Alpaca joined the [[PROJECT:1127]], bringing [[TOKEN:2u1tszSeqZ3qBWF3uNGPFc8TzMk2tdiwknnRMWGWjGWH]] deposits and withdrawals on Solana to its partner network. USDG is the Global Dollar Network's stablecoin, and the integration marked the first time Alpaca supported deposits and withdrawals for tokens outside of Ethereum — a shift that anchors more of its settlement infrastructure to Solana-native liquidity.

Business Scale and Partner Growth

As of September 2025, Alpaca had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue, up from $60 million at the end of 2024. Revenue had doubled year-over-year for three consecutive years through mid-2026. The firm was recognized as FinTech of the Year at the 2025 US FinTech Awards and named in CB Insights' Top 100 Fintechs.

Notable Broker API deployments show the range of use cases the infrastructure supports:

• Gate, the crypto exchange, used Alpaca's Broker API to add US equities, ETFs, IPO access, and tokenized stocks for its 58 million-plus users, across more than 10,000 listed US assets.
• GoTyme Bank in the Philippines embedded crypto trading, including SOL spot exposure, through the Broker API.
• Gotrade, Midas, and Moola are regional investing platforms built on the same infrastructure across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The company also registered Alpaca Derivatives LLC as a CFTC Futures Commission Merchant and NFA member in August 2026, adding regulated support for prediction markets to its licensed footprint.

Funding and Corporate Structure

Alpaca raised a $52 million Series C extension in April 2025, followed by a $150 million Series D at a $1.15 billion valuation in January 2026, led by Drive Capital. In July 2026, the company raised an additional $135 million in equity — led by Peak XV Partners with participation from BNP Paribas's Opera Tech Ventures and Kraken parent company Payward — plus a debt facility from BMO. Total funding disclosed through mid-2026 exceeds $320 million across all rounds, with the 2026 raises alone adding well over $400 million in combined equity and debt.

In April 2026, Alpaca acquired WealthKernel, a UK and EU wealthtech firm, creating Alpaca Europe and gaining FCA and EEA regulatory coverage. European equities trading launched alongside the acquisition.

AI-Native Trading Layer

Alpaca launched an MCP Server in 2025 that exposes its trading capabilities as a tool surface for AI models, enabling natural language order submission and portfolio inspection through Claude, ChatGPT, and similar systems. An open-source Skills Library for AI agents followed, with a Paper Trading Skill released in August 2026 that allows AI assistants to preview, submit, inspect, and manage paper orders across US equities, options, and crypto. In August 2026, Alpaca co-hosted a global online hackathon with lablab.ai offering a $5,000 prize pool for autonomous AI trading agents built on top of its Trading API and MCP infrastructure.

BrokerChooser named Alpaca Best Broker for Algorithmic Trading in December 2025, reflecting a developer-oriented positioning that now extends from automated equity strategies into AI-driven agent workflows.