# Securitize CEO on Tokenization and RWA Growth

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-09-08

## Transcript

We're kind of at the end of the beginning of tokenization.
So now tokenization is here to stay.
Now everybody understands it.
Everybody has heard of it.
Everybody knows it.
But it's really now the beginning of making this a very large multi-trillion dollar industry.
Tokenized assets are taking off in a big way.
But how does all of this work?
Why does it matter?
And what do investors need to know about all of this in the new era of global finance?
Hello and welcome to Milk Road Crypto, the podcast that knows that if you tokenize a Pokemon card, Gary Gensler will suddenly appear and refuse to tell you whether or not it's a security.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Tuesday, September 8th, and today we are joined by Carlos Domingo.
Carlos is the co-founder and CEO of Securitize, a leading platform for issuing and managing tokenized securities and real-world assets on blockchain infrastructure, which he co-founded in 2017.
Tokenization is one of the hottest topics in crypto these days.
Carlos knows all about it, and he's going to tell all of us.
So if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
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So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome to The Milk Road Show.
Carlos, how are you, sir?
Hi, John.
Thanks for having me.
I'm really excited to talk to you.
Carlos, tokenization is a huge topic.
I think the reason it's gotten a lot of attention these days has to do with what's happening on Robinhood chain.
Traders are pairing meme coins with equities, forcing market makers to mint more of these equities.
And this is getting into quite a frenzy here.
What's your reaction to all of this?
And what's your take on this whole situation we're seeing play out right now?
First, those tokens that they're pairing with Memecoins are not equities.
They're debt securities that are issued offshore.
And I think that's where the controversy comes from.
I'm not sure if people understand what they're buying or what they're not buying or the kind of risk that they're taking.
And these last few days, you probably saw as I did the interesting debate between the AMC CEO and what they were doing with their stock and the CEO of Robinhood and other people chiming in about, you know.
the legality or in some cases maybe it's not because it's necessarily legal but what's the the right that a company has in terms of claiming tokenization of somebody else equity without their permission right Yeah.
So for our audience who's listening, who may not be familiar, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and AMC CEO Adam Aaron got into a spat on X.
This is what Carlos is talking about.
And I believe this ended up with someone from Robinhood saying, send your lawyers and we'll educate them.
Carlos, this is a space where the regulation is evolving.
The Clarity Act is still in Congress and the SEC is trying to make this like regulatorily clear for businesses operating in the space.
How does this get resolved?
Do you think that Robinhood is in the right here?
Do you think AMC has a point?
What's your perspective on all this?
So first, one of the things the AMC CEO complained about is that this was not being done following U.S.
securities regulations.
And he's absolutely right, because Robinhood actually is not issuing this in the U.S.
They're issuing this offshore from Jersey, if I'm correct.
So clearly.
You know, they can send as many lawyers as they want, but there is a fact that Robinhood is doing this offshore without following U.S.
regulations.
They're issuing a debt security, not a stock, even though they call it stock tokens.
And then they're basically doing it as a permissionless token, which under Jersey law might actually be, you know, legal, but I'm not sure it's legal in the U.S.
And this is what the AMCCO was complaining, right?
That they're issuing a derivative of their security without their permission and without following U.S.
regulations.
And I think he has a point.
Okay.
Well, I want to talk more about U.S.
regulations.
First, I want to talk about Securitize because you are in the U.S.
and following U.S.
regulations.
Securitize went public this summer.
Many people may not know this, but you all started trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ, which I thought was well chosen.
But this started on July 2nd.
Yes, exactly.
But talk to me about the significance of this and launching a tokenization platform on the New York Stock Exchange at a time when the legality of all this stuff is being so hotly debated.
So first, we are, as you said, we operate in the US and what we do is legally in the US and we issue assets in the US.
And actually the day that we went public in the New York Stock Exchange, we did tokenize our equity, issuing a token that is actually a representation of the equity node.
a debt security or a derivative.
And we did it in the US.
It's available at stocks.securitize.com.
You can trade them.
We follow the regular message with this laws, which are these laws about the pricing that you need to provide people, which these debt securities don't do.
This morning, actually, somebody shared with me in a screenshot where one of these derivatives that has been issued short was trading Apple stock at $50 difference.
I think it was $317 Apple and $300.
56 or 66 these derivatives so that doesn't comply with US securities laws, not to mention the permissionless nature of some of these tokens.
So for us it was a very important milestone in the company.
We started at the end of 2017 so we're close to be nine years old and being able to go public, you know, raise a big amount of money, we raised 250 million dollars as part of the process and then have enough.
strengthen the balance sheet to take it from here because the market is now exploding but it's still in its infancy so i'm very excited about it yeah so i want to understand a little bit better about what securitize does and how all this works how you guys work with your partners could you just describe to us a little bit of what a tokenization platform is um and and how your business works who you're partnering with and how you're doing your business so the tokenization platform is just the beginning of app you know, journey of the stuff that you need to do, right?
So tokenization is basically the process of, you know, representing any type of securities, whether they're equities, stocks, debt securities, as they do in Europe, or fund units, et cetera, using a superior ledger technology, which is a public blockchain, where a lot of the...
things you want to do with securities in terms of trading them, in terms of moving them across investors, settling trades, borrow against them, et cetera, they become a lot easier to do and a lot more streamlined and you eliminate some of the required intermediaries to make all the plumbing work, right?
So you can think of this as upgrading capital markets.
We're not just a tokenization platform.
We are an SEC registered transfer agent, so we have a license to be able to issue and manage securities on behalf of an issuer.
We just happen to use a blockchain, but we're also a broker-dealer.
We're a registered investor advisor.
We have a large fund admin business, et cetera.
So we have a number of licenses in the U.S.
and in Europe that allow us to basically provide all the management and functionality of securities that are being issued on a blockchain.
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Okay, so let's take as a case study a couple of products that BlackRock launched back in August, which was BSTBL and BRSRV, which are two new tokenized products.
Yeah.
Yeah, so these are two new tokenized products BlackRock launched on Ethereum and other blockchains.
Talk to me about what Securitize's involvement was with these products, just as an example of how you guys work in this industry and what you guys are doing.
So if we're going to go back in time a little bit, in 2024, the overall size of what they're calling crypto, the RWA market, the real world assets market, or the tokenized asset market was very, very small.
And then in March 2024, we partnered with BlackRock and we issued the first BlackRock tokenized fund biddle.
That became, it's a tokenized treasury fund, so it's a fund that basically tracks the Fed rate by...
buying and selling short-dated treasuries.
And that became very quickly the fastest growing and the largest asset ever tokenized.
It's currently at close to $3 billion in the U.M.
But the whole industry kind of exploded on the back of that.
And we went from treasuries where under $1 billion to now I think it's $18 or something like that, out of which BlackRock is $3 billion.
But there's many other players that have subsequently come along or they were there.
are now continuing pushing the space and the whole RWA space grew to 40 billion or so.
I mean, it depends which metrics or what you count in.
But anyway, in the tens of billions of dollars from, as I mentioned, low single digit billions.
So it's been the fastest growing part of the industry.
And then I think that most recently what happened was the change in the U.S.
government and in more particular in the helm of the SEC with the appointment of, you know, Chairman Polatkins and the creation of the crypto task force that they've been very vocal supporting tokenization and pushing for, you know, regulatory clarity and changes to make tokenization more viable in the U.S.
And then in terms of the role that we do.
So BlackRock is an asset manager, so they create funds, they buy and sell the underlying of the fund.
And what we do is we act as a transfer agent.
So we are basically the SEC registered transfer agent that manages the securities of their fund.
And we just happen to put them on chain.
As I mentioned, we started with Biddle and we're doing now Bid Reserve as well.
And then the idea is that these securities, because they're tokenized, they can actually have properties that are hard to do without tokenization.
So our securities...
have on-chain liquidity 24-7.
They are transferable peer-to-peer.
They can be used as collateral 24-7.
They pay daily dividends by just basically running a new blockchain transaction once a day, et cetera.
So the tokenized version.
has more properties and more features that makes it better than the non-tokenized version.
So the difference between Biddle and Bid Reserve is Bid Reserve is basically a registered fund that has been designed to be Genius compliant.
So it can be used as a reserve for stable coins, which, as you know, the Genius Act came recently and stated that tokenized funds could be the reserve for stable coins.
So, but we are also the distributor.
We are also a broker dealer.
So we distribute the BlackRock products among many other products from other asset managers that we work with.
So we're not just tokenizing, but we're also distributing and then integrating these products with, you know, derivatives exchanges to use as collateral with DeFi protocols to be able to leverage them and borrow against them, et cetera, to provide more utility to the tokenized securities.
Okay, so you guys act as a broker dealer and a transfer agent, and that's why these institutions and asset managers choose to work with you because you increase their ability to access tokenized rails and distribute their products in ways that other transfer agents or broker dealers may not be able to do.
Is that kind of the situation?
Correct.
You can think of us as kind of the bridge between TradFi assets into crypto rails to just make them better, but somebody needs to sit in between and being able to kind of...
manage those securities and move them and then make them useful when they are in the crypto rail.
So that's exactly the role of Securitize.
Okay, cool.
This is very helpful.
Thank you.
Another question I had, you know, we talked about the partnership with BlackRock, but you've also partnered with a lot of crypto native companies as well.
On May 5th of 2026, Securitize, Jump Trading Group, and Jupiter launched a three-way partnership to enable on-chain and regulatory compliant secondary trading of tokenized equities on the Solana blockchain.
And I would love for you to walk me through a little bit of this partnership and, you know, maybe differentiate this from maybe the way some other people might be.
offering tokenized products on blockchains?
Good.
So Jam Trading, it's a very large prop AMM firm in the chat file space, but it's also the largest crypto market maker.
They have developed what they call a prop AMM technology in Solana that allows you to basically create some sort of an RFQ when people want to sell a digital asset, they sit on the other side and they provide the best price they can find.
They can just make markets that way.
So we worked with Jam to adapt this PropAmm technology so it was compliant with securities regulations so we could actually trade tokenized equities on-chain.
And then we actually, as I mentioned, when we listed on the New York Stock Exchange, we tokenized our own equity and then make it available to trade on Solana.
So you can go to stocks.securitize.io and then you can just...
basically connect your wallet and it's a very kind of crypto native experience.
You have to pass KYC before you, but once you've done it, like when you log in in Robinhood or in Coinbase, you also have to do KYC.
So once you do that, then we wireless your wallet and then you can just basically swap tokenized equity in Securitize against a stable coins.
Or if you already hold the tokenized equity, you can just swap it against the stable coins and we guarantee the best pricing available in the market through.
So Jump is the market maker that provides that.
And then Jupiter is the largest front end in Solana.
So the partnership with Jupiter is about being able to expose those tokenized equities to all the Solana traders so they can actually get access to them to trade.
Okay, so there's a three-way partnership coming together to build this sort of like unique offering in the Solana ecosystem.
Why Solana?
Is there like a specific reason why this blockchain is maybe technically or from a liquidity perspective best suited for this product?
And just walk me through how you evaluate which blockchains you're going to be building these things on or launching these tokenized assets on.
So we've been partnering with Solana for several years.
But we also support other blockchains like Ethereum, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc.
So typically what we look is like what is the partnership structure and where every blockchain has like a different ecosystem and different characteristics.
So in this case, the proper MMM technology that Jam had was already developing in Solana and Jupiter is a Solana front end for the most part.
I'm not sure they support other blockchains, but they're definitely big in Solana.
So obviously that was very clear that.
The ecosystem that we wanted to use was a Solana-based ecosystem, so that was the natural place to develop.
We also tokenized a portion of our equity on Avalanche as well, which is another blockchain that is more from the EVM side, more Ethereum compatible, that is also pushing towards adoption of institutions and RWAs.
So we are blockchain agnostic.
We tend to work with all the large ones and then kind of select each one depending on the ecosystem we're going after.
Okay, so we talked about some of the...
the wall street asset managers that you guys are partnered to talked a little bit about some of these things you're doing more on the crypto native side i want to get your thoughts on something that i just i want to hear what you think about this the dtcc made headlines this summer with plans to do some pilot programs around tokenization the dtcc is this huge multi-trillion dollar clearinghouse but securitize is very conspicuously not involved in this partnership and in this project and i'm curious like differentiate for me like the work that securitize is doing in tokenization versus this pilot program.
Why aren't you guys involved?
Walk me through that.
First, kudos to the TCC because it's a very large stratify incumbent, as you mentioned.
The fact that they're getting into tokenization and that they're forcing all their ecosystem participants to think about tokens and wallets, etc., I think it's a positive thing overall for the ecosystem.
But their approach is a bit more of a post-trade improvement.
The securities itself, they still sit in a central securities depository.
They still settle T plus one.
etc.
And then they're just issuing a token that represents the entitlement.
Most people don't realize when you buy securities on a broker-dealer like, let's say, Robinhood, you're not getting actual shares.
You're just getting an entitlement towards some shares that the broker-dealer has an entitlement towards some shares that sit on DTCC.
So there's three layers of abstraction and intermediaries until your shares are there.
So entitlements are fully legal in the US.
So from that perspective, I don't think that...
You can compare to all these things happening offshore.
The entitlements have full securities entitlements, so they get all their rights, et cetera.
I think that the main kind of everyone downside of what they're doing is that it's more of like a closed ecosystem to try to provide post-trade improvements for the existing market participants, right?
So the market structure who has access to the tokens is the clearing market participants.
They're doing it on closed ecosystems, non-public chains, et cetera.
I think it's great, but it's just only, you know, solves a part of a problem within that existing ecosystem.
We do think that when you take securities and you move them natively or through an entitlement, which is a valid way of doing it, into a public blockchain, then other kind of innovation, like more permissionless open innovation can happen that is not going to happen there, right?
So I always tell people to think of this as when the internet started.
you're a lot younger than me, so you might not remember, but at the beginning there was American Online and MSN, and those were great initiatives that they were tapping into this new technology called the internet that came up to create these ecosystems that were perceived as safer for some type of participants because they were close in control.
But ultimately, I think that in every industry, open innovation is what prevails and where innovation really happens.
When it's permissionless innovation, anybody can go and build something on top of because that's where innovation happens.
And you can actually see with what's happening on the Robinhood chain, right?
Like, I don't think that Robinhood thought that by issuing these debt securities, people were going to start pairing them with meme coins and do like that.
That happens because it's done on a public chain and it's, you know...
permissionless innovation and that's not going to happen on the DTC pilot, right?
So I think we kind of sit somewhere in between, like we want to be on the public chains, we want to have, you know, permissionless open innovation, but at the same time we want to, you know, be fully compliant with US regulations.
Thank you, Carlos.
That's really helpful.
I think that's an important point that I didn't want to get lost in this conversation, which is that there's meaningful differences between how you tokenize what, and sometimes it's just stapling extra steps onto the legacy system, and sometimes it's completely redoing things from the ground up.
Anyway, I think that's really important to highlight that for the audience.
Could you tie this back for me to the blockchain ecosystems and their native digital assets?
You said it's important to build on this public blockchain infrastructure.
How does this drive value?
adoption back to these crypto ecosystems and to their assets and what's the connection between tokenization and those blockchain ecosystems?
I mean, look, when you issue assets on a public blockchain, you need to consume, you know, block space and then you need to pay for it.
And that value should be occurring in the native token of the blockchain.
I know there's a lot of controversy about whether this layer three chains, like Romic is a layer three because it's on top of a layer two, which is arbitrary term.
where they ultimately accrue value or not on Ethereum.
But, you know, certainly like what we do on Solana and Avalanche, it accrues value on Solana and Avalanche because, you know, we consume their native token.
We create, we also hopefully get other people to build other things that also consume the native token and make the blockchain more useful.
And the more useful a blockchain is, the more people will consume the native token and the native token should go up in value, right?
So that's kind of like the...
the thesis of how the digital assets accrue value versus how we accrue value, which is basically a service provider, right?
Like charging fees for issuing securities or charging fees for trading, et cetera.
More like on the application layer, if you want.
Why does this matter so much to the end user of these products?
If people just want a low friction way to trade meme coins, why should they care so much about how these tokenized products are getting to market?
And what's sort of at stake in the long term here?
And give me a framing on that.
I mean, if you want to trade meme coins, then you shouldn't care about anything because you're not trading anything of intrinsic value.
You're just playing around, which is great.
Some people like that.
But if you're buying an Apple share, you know, you should understand what you're buying and should be communicated to you what you're actually buying or not, right?
And I think that there is a bit of a marketing issue here where I'm not sure how people are aware they are that what they're buying is not a stock, even though they're called stock tokens or they're called tokenized stocks or tokenized equities.
It's a derivative.
In many cases, it's a derivative, but there's like, I don't know, five different models.
It doesn't actually...
necessarily carry the same rights.
So if there is a split or which actually has happened that there was a split in the market and one of these derivatives didn't split and it was trading at five times different price, that the price you're getting might not be the same price that you will be getting buying the real thing.
That if there is a dividend distribution, you might actually not be entitled to get it because you haven't been KYC and maybe you don't, you know, pass KYC for some reason if you wanted to, et cetera.
I think it's a bit of a marketing issue.
And then the other thing is you're taking counterparty risk, right?
Because when you're buying a debt security, you're basically taking counterparty risk towards the company issuing the debt security.
So it's not the same as buying a native share through a transfer agent where there's no counterparty risk.
Even if the transfer agent goes bankrupt, you're still the owner of the share.
Or if you're buying a full securities entitlement where you're taking counterparty risk towards...
DTCC, but I don't think that anybody thinks that DTCC is a risky organization because the entire US public markets sit on top of it.
So I think that people need to know what they're buying and it needs to be communicated properly.
And I think there is a bit of a miscommunication issue in the industry today.
I think you're great at communicating about this.
So I appreciate you sharing these details with the audience.
Carlos, I got to get your thoughts on this.
The SEC last week, I believe, for the first time in nearly 40 years since like 1983, I think, issued a proposal for a major rewrite to the transfer agent rules, transfer agent rules, which has come up several times in this conversation.
Before we get into like asking too much about.
all this stuff.
Tell us a little bit more about what a transfer agent is, what they do, and why this is such a significant move from the SEC to propose a rule change after 40 years to this.
So transfer agents is this thing that now has become very popular and sexy to own and to talk about.
But in October 2018, I raised our CSA.
And then I went back to my board and I told them, look, I'm going to register a transfer agent because I think that's the right regulatory intermediary.
And they thought I've gone completely crazy.
They were like, transfer agencies are all dated business that nobody likes them because it's such a manual process, such a bad experience.
I was like, precisely that's why you want to get there, right?
Because this is an opportunity to actually make this experience that and this friction that most people have because of transfer agents a better experience.
And I think blockchain enables you to do a lot of the transfer agent functionality in a better way.
So now obviously has become a very popular thing.
Every single company in the tokenization space is registering transfer agents.
You have bullies.
spending 4.2 billion dollars buying a transfer agent the second largest one uh which is crazy if you think about that you know a crypto company will be by the buying the second largest transfer agent um but a transfer agent is just basically the regulatory intermediary that is responsible for keeping track of who owns what right like you know when there are shares out there somebody needs to keep track of what happens somebody is responsible for uh you know doing corporate actions so like i don't know if you want to move your shares from your own name into a trust, or you get divorced and you need to split them, or there's a dividend that needs to be distributed, or there's a proxy vote that needs to be conducted.
So transfer agents kind of sit in the middle of all this, and therefore they are a very critical piece of capital market infrastructure to manage securities better.
Now, transfer agents, as you said, the ruling for transfer agents was done 40 years ago.
And it has actually things that are as absurd as like, we have to keep track of the physical address of a person.
when we don't actually issue physical securities and everything is digital.
I remember, and this is an anecdote that is very funny, but when we registered our transfer agent in 2019, the SEC told us, oh, you need to fingerprint every employee that touches share certificates.
And we were like, we're issuing shares on a blockchain.
There's no share certificates.
You said because this piece of paper, they are like, well, then fingerprint the employees of the developers.
So we actually did that, believe it or not.
So the transfer agents operate under extremely updated rules.
Now, it's great that the SEC now is finally pushing to modernize these rules.
I have to give credit, though, to the person that actually started that, which is actually somebody that works for me now, Brett Redfern, who is, you know, a few months ago, joined as the president of Securitize.
And Brett Redfern was the director of trading at markets with Jay Clayton before Gensler.
I've been through three.
So at that time, Brett Ralfom actually wrote the first draft for the transfer agent modernization, but that was towards the tail end of their time at the SEC.
So when Gesler came, I actually went to see him with a list of things, and transfer agent modernization was one of them.
And he just didn't feel that it was a priority for them.
They had a lot.
long list of all the things that they wanted to do.
So it's great to see that the SEC is doing this because, you know, it can actually simplify the life of, especially the digital transfer agents.
And at the end of the day, this is going to make it better and cheaper for investors, right?
Which ultimately are the ones that you want to benefit.
So if, you know, this is still in draft stage for people to comment, but there are certain things there could be very interesting.
Like, you know, I don't need to have a physical address for a person.
I just need to have a wallet.
if I track their things on the blockchain, because the wallet is the way for me to communicate with them.
If I want to, I can actually ask them to vote through connecting their wallet into a website.
I can send them a dividend on stablecoins to the wallet, et cetera.
So there's a number of things.
And by the way, this is a very, very long document they put out there that we're still sorting through, but it is very promising.
I think modernizing transfer agents is going to benefit the digital ones and everybody else will have to adapt to it.
And it's going to make us, you know, to streamline operations, which...
Ultimately, as I mentioned, the number one beneficiary is the investor, right?
That gets a better experience, a more digital experience.
We just went public, as you mentioned, and we did it through a SPAC, and then we had to do a proxy vote.
And it takes like 20 days.
And we don't even know who needs to vote because we don't know who holds the shares.
It's like insane.
So I think that there is a lot of things on capital markets that could be modernized, and it's great to see the SEC doing that.
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Carlos, fingerprint the developers sounds like exactly the kind of government bureaucracy that we've all had to deal with.
So thank you for handling these headaches for all of us.
Yeah, I actually fingerprint my job as well because we're okay.
So my bitch, everybody, we don't have anything to hide, but I promise you I haven't done.
since i've been running this company for almost nine years i haven't touched a share certificate ever in my life I'm glad the SEC is still on top of things.
I do want to hear more about how you think this might change the industry though, because as you said, this has been discussed for a long time.
It's been something people have been pushing for for a while, but this SEC seems to be finally willing to move forward with it.
What does this unlock in terms of things that crypto projects can now do that they maybe couldn't have done in the past?
Does this change things for DeFi?
What do you see on the horizon if this modernization for transfer agents does go through?
So I think it basically...
you know, makes it tokenization better and eliminates friction in how you tokenize things.
Because as I mentioned, one of the ways to do it, not everybody's following the same rules that we discussed at the beginning, but if you want to do it in the US, you know, the kind of the natural intermediary is the transfer agent.
So the more the transfer agent can operate native digitally on a blockchain with wallets, et cetera, you know, the more than those.
tokens can actually integrate with the rest of the ecosystem, right?
And ultimately eliminate a lot of the friction of intermediaries.
Like we do things, most people don't understand, but, you know, if you want to transfer shares in a private company through a traditional transfer agent, they sometimes, as you refer, for a certificate.
So you have to actually go to a bank, again, something called a medallion guarantee, which you've probably never heard of, but probably people in the audience have heard of that when you have to have a medallion guarantee to guarantee that you actually own the shares because they don't have a simple way to prove that you own the shares before they transfer them somewhere else.
So there's so much friction, cost, etc., time involved in doing certain operations that should be very, very simple.
With a digital transfer agent like us, we issue these tokens on chain, you know, the smart...
contracts will control the transfers.
You can peer-to-peer transfer them to any other wireless investor.
You don't need to talk to me.
You don't need to pay any money to do it.
It's all free.
It's all instant, et cetera.
So the amount of benefits of improving the capital markets infrastructure with blockchain, it's an endless conversation.
And the transfer agent kind of sits at the middle of it, right?
So making sure the transfer agents are fully digital, they operate on a blockchain, they use wallets, et cetera, it's the beginning of unlocking a lot of other value.
How do you see Securitize positioned in that world?
In other words, like will this regulatory clarity and these changes, advancements in the technology here, will that give you guys more of an advantage in the market and sort of push out some of these less, let's say less regulatory compliant of alternatives that are on the market?
Or do you think this just brings a huge wave of additional competition?
What do you foresee for Securitize in that world?
No, I think that simplifying.
by the way, as I mentioned, we push for transfer agent regulations because we suffer the friction of doing that, right?
Like we do it because we want to be compliant, but it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean that it's not a pain in the ass to do it.
So if they can actually simplify our life.
Of course, it's not going to be just for us.
It's going to be for everybody else, but so be it.
This industry, look, I'm not worried that much about competition.
It's about growth, right?
This is about the 40 or 50 billion, whatever number you pick of tokenized securities, how that gets to a trillion dollars, and then everybody will find their space.
There will always be some people offshore catering to the more DJing people, et cetera.
That's fine.
But there will also be the more institutional focused, compliant people that will want to do the things in the US, which is...
the largest capital markets in the world, and there will be people in between.
So I don't think that this is a one-takes-all industry at all.
So there'll be multiple models coexisting.
You'll have the DTC doing their own post-trade thing there, et cetera.
So this is not an area where I think that Securitize is going to have 90% market share.
We've never had it, and we don't have it today.
And eliminating friction will bring more.
benefits for us and for everybody else.
And so be it.
This will help the industry advance, which ultimately is what everybody, I think, should be aspiring to.
Okay, great answer.
Appreciate that.
I want to talk about that comment about growing the pie, growing the number of tokenized assets on chain.
As you mentioned, we're now between like 40 and 50 billion of assets on chain, but there are trillions of assets in the world.
How do you as Securitize think about prioritizing where to start and where to focus in terms of trying to bring some of that, you know, many hundreds of trillions on chain?
And what's the strategy there and the outlook from your perspective?
So, yes, there's trillions of assets there, but...
There's also many, many different asset classes, right?
And what people don't realize is that tokenizing a dollar, which are stable coins, is a business that we don't do, but Circle, for instance, does.
And tokenizing treasuries is a different problem with different counterparties, advantages, different skills you need to have.
Tokenizing equities is a different problem, et cetera.
So you need to pick kind of asset classes and try to focus on those because, you know, what...
The advantages you bring, what licenses you need, what you want to do with them, etc., is not the same, right?
So we focus primarily in two distinct segments.
One is funds and yield-bearing assets.
So there we have a position where we have a leadership position on tokenized treasuries.
We also have a very large AAA CLO, which has a higher yield.
Treasuries is 3.6% today.
You know, the CLOs are like, you know, close to 5%.
Then we just released another product with Neuberger Berman that has like above 7% yield.
And then we have also private credit that has like 8% or 9% yield.
So we're trying to cover the yield curve.
And of course, the higher you go on yield, the longer duration, the higher risk.
So it's a trade-off between, you know, getting more yield and either having less liquidity or taking more risk, right?
But that's fine.
There's investors in all the spectrum.
And we're trying to kind of like provide as many products as...
as possible on that yield curve.
And then also make sure all our products are as fully integrated as possible with as many DeFi protocols to be used as collateral, to borrow against them, to leverage the products, et cetera.
So that's one aspect of our business.
The other one is the tokenization of equities, which is a completely different business.
You're talking to different counterparties because you're talking to issuers, the transfer agents there.
play a big role.
So we have partnered with ComputerShared and Continental, which are the first and the third largest transfer agent to be able to do tokenization of equities.
We have a big project with the New York Stock Exchange about, you know, 24-7 trading of tokenized equities on a digital venue that they launched in separated from the traditional venue.
So that's like, for us, a completely different business in terms of You know, that's where we work with Jump, as we mentioned, on the Propo M&M chain, on Solana, et cetera.
So the two ecosystems are very distinct.
They have a little bit of overlap, but for the most part, they are two different problems with two different kind of like actors that you need to partner with and that you need to, you know, work with to make things happen.
And then, of course, there's tons of other things that is real estate, that is private assets, private equity that is like this and that.
Right, exactly.
So there's tons of these asset classes and I appreciate you giving some insight into how you're thinking about the focuses there.
Where are you seeing the most traction, the most adoption?
Is it in the equity space?
Is it somewhere else?
What's getting the most attention right now?
No, equities is growing very rapidly.
Equities, right?
Because most of what's growing are debt securities that are not equities, but people refer to them as equities, but nevertheless within that.
category of indirect price exposure to equities, if you want.
That's going very rapidly, but it's still, I don't know, like $2.5 billion or something like that.
So it's pretty small.
Most of it is not native tokenization.
You know, the liquidity, as we discussed, is pretty bad.
Like what I was telling you this morning, I saw in Jupiter that I'm not going to mention the name of the competitor because there's no need to trash anybody publicly, but they were trading at $50 different price than Apple during the market hours, by the way.
This is not...
of market hours, because of market hours, you can argue that because traditional markets are closed, that these things are the peck, right?
So I think that market is very nascent.
It's very fragmented.
It's very messy, if you want, et cetera.
So there's still a lot of growth and room to do more things, because that's a huge market that is like $110 trillion, that just a very small percentage moves the needle massively in terms of size, right?
The fund space, I think, is more mature.
It has started earlier.
We've been doing fund tokenization since we started with KKR and Hamilton Lane and then in 2024, BlackRock, and there's a ton of space there.
I think that's more mature.
It's more diverse in the sense that there's not just one asset class that you're tokenizing.
You're tokenizing treasuries or bonds or CLOs or credit, private credit, et cetera.
But that is more mature and the majority of the market is there today.
The other market is nascent and it's kind of more crazy today, but it's growing rapidly and it's probably going to become the largest one at some point.
Okay, this is helpful.
Carlos, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier in the conversation.
When Securitize went public this summer, you guys also got a liquidity unlock of around $350, $400 million, somewhere in that neighborhood.
I'm really curious your strategy with how to apply that capital to continue to grow, Securitize, and just talk to me about the strategy going forward from here.
Yes, so we raised $250 million.
We don't need the money to operate the company.
We have like, I don't know, 14, 15 years runway at the current, you know, bond rate, which obviously we're planning on improving over time.
So that's not where we raise money from, even though it's good to have that money in case for any reason things happen.
Like this industry, as you know, is very cyclical and volatile.
But we've been, you know, very public saying that we've been looking at acquisitions.
I think this industry is about to consolidate.
I don't think that...
You win by just being a tokenization platform and not doing anything else.
I think the market structure is more complex than that.
And I think that because the immaturity of the industry, to be able to offer a more comprehensive whole solution of building blocks that are together, and we've been actively doing that.
We started with the transfer agent, the broker-dealer, then fund admin, then IRA, et cetera.
So there's still all the stuff that we're looking there for the existing asset classes plus others.
And then we've been looking also...
you know, internationally, what can we do to expand our, you know, licenses in other geographies where there might be interesting opportunities.
Well, Carlos, I'm going to be paying very close attention to see where all this goes, because as you said, there's a lot changing.
The rules are changing.
Consolidation.
It changes very, very quickly.
Crypto has always been, and it's always been very interesting industry, precisely because of that.
It also makes it hard to understand for people and to distinguish.
you know, reality from just announcements.
But it's a very exciting industry.
I think that, you know, we're kind of at the end of the beginning of tokenization.
So now tokenization is here to stay.
Now everybody understands it.
Everybody has heard of it.
Everybody knows it.
But it's really now the beginning of making this a very large, you know, multi-trillion dollar industry.
Carlos Domingo, Securitize founder and CEO, thank you so much for being on The Milcro show.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
pretty much online all the time at Carlos Domingo on X.
I probably spend more time than I should there.
So you can find me there on X.
You can go to Securitize.io to see what our company does.
You can actually create your own Securitize ID, which is very simple to do if you're a retail person.
You can go to stocks.Securitize.io and you can actually look at how our own chain trading of our own stock in Solana works.
It's obviously a registered security, so anybody can purchase it.
So yeah, those are the places where you can find us.
Carlos, thank you so much for doing this.
I think this is a very important but somewhat confusing topic, and you're an excellent communicator about these things.
So thank you so much for being on The Milk Road Show.
I hope you can catch up on it.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
I know I did.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of The Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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