🔥 Inside Securitize's $400M Public Debut & The Race to Tokenize…

🎯 The Moment Has Arrived

On July 1st, 2025, Securitize completed its SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners, raising $400 million at a $1.25 billion pre-money valuation. The following day, it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker SECZ. More importantly, Securitize launched the tokenized version of its own equity — making it one of the largest natively tokenized public companies in the world at approximately $250 million in market cap.

But despite this milestone, CEO Carlos Domingo is clear: "We're really far away from tokenizing the world." With only $30-35 billion in tokenized assets on-chain today compared to hundreds of trillions of dollars in total addressable assets, the journey has barely begun.

📊 The Securitize Business Model: Three Revenue Streams

Securitize operates as a vertically integrated infrastructure provider across three distinct but complementary businesses:

Transfer Agent Platform: An SEC-registered entity that maintains official ownership records for securities. Unlike traditional transfer agents, Securitize uses public blockchains as the underlying ledger technology, enabling tokenization at the source. Revenue comes from subscription-based fees and AUM-based charges.
Broker-Dealer: Enables actual trading of tokenized securities with proper regulatory compliance. This is a transaction-based business that generates fees from capital raises and secondary trading.
Fund Administration: Acquired specifically to handle the reconciliation between 24/7 on-chain activity and traditional backend systems that don't operate continuously. Critical for institutional clients like BlackRock.

As Domingo explains: "Tokenization for the sake of putting things on chain doesn't change anything. You need to be able to do things with it."

🏦 The BlackRock Blueprint: Why Funds Lead the Way

When it comes to adoption timelines, tokenized funds are years ahead of tokenized equities. Securitize's partnership with BlackRock to launch tokenized treasury funds has proven the model at institutional scale.

The advantages are concrete:

Peer-to-peer transfers without intermediary delays
Daily dividend payouts via automatic token issuance (Securitize is the only fund in BlackRock's portfolio offering daily dividend reinvestment)
24/7 on-chain liquidity for instant position exits
Reduced reconciliation complexity and operational overhead

Beyond BlackRock, major players like Apollo and BNY Mellon have entered the space, alongside competitors like Franklin Templeton and WisdomTree. As Domingo notes: "On the fund space, we already got the Apple of the funds — BlackRock. It's a much easier conversation now."

⚖️ The Compliance Battlefield: Real Tokenization vs. Synthetic Derivatives

Not all "tokenized stocks" are created equal. The market has bifurcated into two distinct approaches:

Native Tokenization (Securitize Model):

Securities are issued directly on-chain through a registered transfer agent
Holders appear on the official cap table
Full rights to dividends, voting, and corporate actions
Zero counterparty risk beyond the issuer itself
Integrated with DTCC and follows Reg NMS pricing rules
KYC required — permissioned assets on permissionless blockchains

Synthetic/Derivative Models (Ondo, Robinhood Tokenized Stocks):

Third-party representations of securities, not the securities themselves
Introduces counterparty risk with the platform
Fragments liquidity across non-fungible versions
May lack proper corporate action handling (Domingo cites an example where a stock split wasn't reflected on-chain, causing a 5x price discrepancy)
In some cases, permissionless and offshore, creating regulatory gray areas

Domingo is direct about the risks: "Some platforms are distributing these assets through unregulated, offshore Chinese crypto platforms, probably selling to Chinese people connecting with a VPN. If people want to take regulatory risks, that's their problem. That's not how I run the company."

He predicts the compliant model will eventually dominate: "Once you have the real things on chain where you're not taking any counterparty risk, I just don't see how liquidity doesn't get sucked into that asset instead of the fake versions."

🔧 The Technical Challenge: Trading Equities On-Chain While Following Reg NMS

One of Securitize's most complex innovations is enabling compliant on-chain trading of public equities that follows U.S. securities law — specifically Regulation NMS Rule 610 and 611, which mandate best execution pricing.

Here's how it works:

Securitize fetches the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) from off-chain Securities Information Processors (essentially "the off-chain equivalent of Chainlink oracles")
Market maker Jump Trading uses proprietary AMM technology on Solana to provide continuous pricing
When a trade executes on-chain (swapping USDC for tokenized SECZ), the system ensures pricing stays within regulatory bounds
Every trade is reported to FINRA for compliance

This creates an unusual situation where DeFi-style swaps must conform to TradFi price discipline. As Domingo describes it: "Jump gets their price from a different provider, and we make sure that when the swap happens on-chain, it happens at least at that price."

The complexity comes from managing 12-second Ethereum block times, potential MEV attacks, and the risk that prices move between fetching NBBO data and settlement, causing trade failures.

Fortunately, relief may be coming. The SEC has proposed eliminating Rules 610 and 611 — a change that would dramatically simplify on-chain equity trading. Domingo explains: "If you think about crypto, it doesn't have that. Coinbase and Binance trade completely separately but they always trade at the same price. Market makers fix discrepancies emergently."

🌐 Why Avalanche and Solana? Chain Selection Strategy

Securitize chose to launch tokenized SECZ equity on Avalanche for spot holdings and Solana for active trading. The reasoning is strategic:

Avalanche:

Long-standing partnership (first chain used to tokenize the KKR fund)
Deterministic settlement — critical for securities because once a trade is reported to the SEC, you can't unwind it later
Already has broker-dealer approval in Europe

Solana:

Jump Trading's proprietary AMM technology is built on Solana
Fast block times enable continuous price updates for NBBO compliance
Lower slippage for traders

What about Ethereum? Domingo is direct: "On Ethereum you have to deal with block time and MEV issues. We're looking at who else is doing proprietary AMMs or RFQs in which chains. We want to expand, but we need the right tech stack."

He issued a call to builders: "If you have a good RFQ or proprietary AMM that works well on Ethereum and other technologies, reach out to us. We'd love to talk to you."

🎯 The Liquidity Problem: Where Are the Market Makers?

One of the biggest bottlenecks for tokenized equities is liquidity — or rather, the lack of it.

Traditional market makers like Jump Trading (which Securitize partners with for SECZ) won't touch unregulated synthetic derivatives due to:

Regulatory risk — they've been burned before and won't repeat mistakes
Hedging difficulty — derivatives aren't the underlying asset, making hedging strategies complex

As Domingo points out: "For a market maker, they're taking a massive regulatory risk and having problems with hedging because these are derivative instruments that they don't have other markets to hedge against. I don't see those things becoming very liquid anytime soon."

In contrast, once natively tokenized equities reach scale, regulated market makers can participate freely. The path forward requires:

More issuers bringing securities on-chain natively
Institutional-grade infrastructure (which Securitize provides)
Clear regulatory frameworks (improving under current SEC leadership)

📈 The Path Forward: Who Tokenizes First?

Securitize isn't targeting Apple or Google next. The lowest-hanging fruit falls into two categories:

1. Crypto-Native Companies

Companies that already understand the value proposition. Domingo: "Crypto companies will want to have their equity natively tokenized and controlled by them, and provide the real thing to their users."

2. Retail-Centric Businesses

Companies with 50%+ retail ownership that want to expand retail participation and leverage on-chain distribution.

Domingo draws a parallel to Robinhood's retail IPO journey: "Six years ago they started doing retail IPOs with unsexy companies. Then they did SpaceX. Now it's a norm — every single IPO offers a retail tranche. Eventually there will be a tokenized tranche of an IPO. It will start small and grow."

For funds, the strategy is quality over quantity. Securitize wants a curated portfolio of differentiated products: treasuries, investment-grade bonds, CLOs, and credit instruments that complement each other rather than cannibalize distribution.

🔄 The Perpetuals Connection: Completing the Basis Trade On-Chain

One of the most promising developments is the convergence of spot tokenized equities and perpetual futures (perps).

As Domingo explains: "Perps need spot markets because perps need to feed the market from somewhere else. All these perps trading equities today don't have a 24/7 spot market."

He shared an anecdote: "A perp platform told us they're not allowing funding rate updates during weekends because they don't have spot price. They just don't know what the funding rate should be."

With native tokenized equities providing continuous on-chain spot markets, perp platforms can:

Offer 24/7 funding rate updates
Enable users to post tokenized equities as collateral
Support basis trades (simultaneously long spot, short perp) entirely on-chain

According to a trader Domingo spoke with, there's currently a 100 basis point arbitrage opportunity on assets like SpaceX between spot and perp markets — if both existed on-chain efficiently.

"Perps converging with spot markets are a very interesting innovation. It will increase trading in both platforms."

💰 What's Next: Deploying $400 Million

Securitize now sits on a $400 million war chest. Domingo is clear about priorities:

Not on the shopping list: Buying competitors ("Too much overlap in terms of tech. We're already the largest platform.")

On the shopping list:

Trading infrastructure and complementary capabilities
Product expansion for the 650 digital asset funds Securitize administers
International expansion — new jurisdictions and licensing opportunities

The immediate goal isn't just survival — it's preparing for scale: "Having $400 million is an insurance policy. We don't need to think about running out of money for many, many years. But we need to put the money to work."

🚀 The Three-Year Vision: $1 Trillion On-Chain

Industry projections for tokenized assets range wildly from $2 trillion to $30 trillion. Domingo is measured in his optimism.

Starting from $30-35 billion today, he sees $1 trillion within three years as the key psychological and practical milestone:

"If we get to a trillion dollars, I think that's the number that moves the needle from a size perspective. If we stay at 10% market share of $1 trillion, that's $100 billion in AUM plus transactions — 20 times what we have today on the platform."

But he's realistic about collective effort: "This is not just me. It has to be the industry pushing forward collectively. The fact that so many people are doing tokenization now — even if I might not agree with certain models — is a good thing. We were by ourselves for a very long time, and that doesn't help anybody."

🎬 Final Thought: The World Isn't Tokenized Yet

For all the progress — a $1.25 billion valuation, partnerships with BlackRock and the New York Stock Exchange, and breakthrough infrastructure connecting TradFi rails to DeFi primitives — Securitize's CEO remains grounded.

The world is not tokenized yet. Assets on-chain represent a rounding error compared to the hundreds of trillions of dollars in global securities. The technology works. The regulation is evolving favorably. The partnerships are in place.

Now comes the hard part: demand.

As Domingo puts it: "The supply side is there. Everybody wants to tokenize everything. The bottleneck is on the consumption side — who is actually buying those funds, who is actually trading them on-chain. The big step change comes when tokenized assets can be consumed by traditional investors who don't even have to know something is on-chain or tokenized."

Just like connecting to the internet no longer requires downloading TCP/IP software and dialing a modem, the day will come when transacting on blockchains is invisible, instant, and universal.

Until then, Securitize is building the pipes.