Securitize’s first earnings report after its IPO landed with a thud for the RWA trade.
After the U.S. market closed on Aug. 12, the tokenization company reported record tokenized assets under management of $4.3 billion, up 16% year over year, and on-chain transaction volume of $5.3 billion, up 147%.
The revenue line told a different story. Quarterly revenue came in at $14.4 million, down 5% from a year earlier and below Wall Street’s $20.6 million estimate by more than 30%. Net loss reached $21.7 million, or $2.37 per share, versus analyst expectations for a loss of $0.15 per share. Adjusted EBITDA moved from positive $1.8 million a year ago to negative $5.5 million.
Securitize shares fell 20% in after-hours trading. Combined with continued weakness over the six weeks since its listing through a SPAC structure, the company’s market value has dropped sharply from its $1.25 billion IPO valuation.
A tokenization plumbing business
The article frames Securitize as a core infrastructure provider in tokenized finance rather than the owner of the economics sitting on top of it.
In March 2024, BlackRock launched BUIDL, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, a tokenized U.S. Treasury money market fund issued on Ethereum. Securitize provides the tokenization infrastructure behind that fund, handling issuance, transfer agency, compliance KYC, and broker-dealer services. By mid-2026, BUIDL had surpassed $2.5 billion in assets, expanded across seven public blockchains, and was accepted by exchanges including Binance and Deribit as trading collateral.
That product is one of the clearest benchmark cases in the RWA sector and one of Securitize’s strongest calling cards. Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane, and VanEck have also issued tokenized products through the platform. In the earnings statement, CEO Carlos Domingo said the company manages “approximately $5 billion in on-chain assets” and has “seven tokenized assets over $100 million in size, more than any other platform.”
Even so, the company’s role is closer to a builder and operator of the pipes. BlackRock sets the product and collects the fund management fee. Securitize earns fees tied to issuance, connectivity, and servicing.
Revenue split and cost pressure
Securitize reports two main revenue streams.
- Tokenization revenue, which includes onboarding fees for on-chain infrastructure and recurring fees tied to AUM, was $7.84 million for the quarter, down 12% year over year.
- Asset Servicing revenue, which includes transfer agency and fund administration services, was $6.60 million, up 3%.
Together, they produced total quarterly revenue of $14.4 million.
Costs rose much faster. Total operating expenses climbed 56% year over year to $24.1 million. Selling and administrative expense increased 1.33x to $8.2 million, while compensation and benefits rose 31% to $10.5 million. With 194 employees, the company spent $18.7 million on labor and administration in a single quarter, against $14.4 million in revenue.
Sequential figures looked weak as well. In the first quarter, Securitize posted a record $19.5 million in revenue, including $11.14 million from tokenization and $8.34 million from asset servicing. One quarter later, revenue fell 26%. On the earnings call, CEO Carlos Domingo used the word “softer.”
$4.3 billion of AUM, but only $14.4 million of quarterly revenue
The article treats that as the key issue in the report.
Using the figures provided, dividing $14.4 million in quarterly revenue by $4.3 billion in average AUM implies an annualized fee rate of about 1.34 basis points. For comparison, BlackRock charges 25 basis points annually on IBIT, its spot Bitcoin ETF, while plain index funds typically charge around 3 to 10 basis points.
That leaves Securitize, as a tokenization infrastructure provider, earning less than one-tenth of a traditional fund management fee.
The article argues that the reason is structural. In a tokenized Treasury fund, the underlying yield on the assets goes to investors. Fund management fees go to the asset manager, such as BlackRock or Apollo. Custody fees go to banks such as BNY Mellon. What remains for Securitize is the tokenization platform fee and the transfer agency fee, the thinnest layer in the stack.
Transaction growth did not solve that problem. On-chain volume rose 147% to $5.3 billion, but revenue did not follow. Based on the quarter’s revenue, each $1 of transaction volume generated less than 0.3 cents in revenue.
The company’s assets under administration in fund services also declined, falling from roughly $30 billion to $24.3 billion, a drop of about 20%. It serviced 663 funds, but the average revenue contribution per fund remained low.
A broader RWA problem, not just one company
The article argues that Securitize’s results expose a wider issue across the tokenization sector.
As of July 2026, transferable tokenized assets on-chain were worth about $31 billion across 167 platforms and were held by 960,000 addresses. That figure has grown by more than 300% over two years.
Tokenized Treasuries are the largest single category, with more than $10 billion in value. The article says the technical barrier in this segment is not especially high. Turning money market fund shares into smart contract representations is largely an exercise in compliance and custody integration. Once that infrastructure is in place, marginal cost moves close to zero.
That creates the possibility that tokenization infrastructure becomes a winner-take-most market with thin profit margins, similar to the infrastructure-as-a-service layer in the early cloud era. The article notes that Amazon Web Services eventually proved scale could turn IaaS into a highly profitable business, but AWS sold a broader bundle including compute, storage, and databases. Securitize, by contrast, still mainly sells the act of moving assets on-chain.
Who captures the value of tokenization
The article’s answer is straightforward: at this stage, most of the value is being captured by asset managers and issuers.
BlackRock collects management fees on BUIDL, which already oversees assets in the billions of dollars. Ondo Finance has built more than $460 million in TVL through OUSG and USDY. Because Ondo acts as both asset manager and protocol layer, it can capture revenue from both issuance and platform operations.
Securitize, by comparison, is a pure-play technical supplier focused on getting assets on-chain. In that position, its revenue and margins have come in well below earlier expectations.
The article also cites research from rwa.xyz showing that tokenization and secondary-market liquidity are not the same thing. Issuing a token does not automatically create a tradable market. Daily volume and bid-ask spreads vary widely by asset class. Treasury tokens are relatively active, while private credit tokens have almost no liquidity. In other words, the idea of tokenizing everything remains far ahead of the reality of trading everything on-chain.
Valuation may need to look more like financial infrastructure
BCG and Ripple projected in 2023 that tokenized assets could reach $16 trillion by 2033. Even if that number ends up lower, the article says the market would still be measured in trillions. The harder question is how much revenue infrastructure providers can keep if fee rates remain around 1 to 2 basis points.
It points to Computershare as a useful comparison. Computershare is the world’s largest stock transfer agent, serves 58% of S&P 500 companies, and generates roughly $3.5 billion in annual revenue. According to the article, it operates at a scale far beyond Securitize, covers hundreds of thousands of securities globally, and spent decades building sticky customer relationships and regulatory barriers.
If Securitize ultimately looks more like an on-chain version of Computershare, then its revenue ceiling, growth path, and valuation logic may need to be judged as financial infrastructure rather than high-growth software. At its IPO valuation of $1.25 billion, the company was trading at close to 18x price-to-sales on annualized revenue of less than $70 million. The article argues that this multiple assumes a growth inflection that has not shown up in the current report.
After this earnings release, the market’s lens on RWA appears to be shifting. The question is no longer only how fast tokenized assets can grow. It is also how much a tokenization platform can earn from each dollar of AUM.