Securitize listed and put its equity on-chain the same day
In an article written by Prathik Desai and translated by Saoirse for Foresight News, the central argument is simple: if a company wants to prove the case for tokenized securities, it should be willing to use the model itself. Securitize did exactly that.
On July 2, 2026, Securitize co-founder and CEO Carlos Domingo rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange as the company went public. That same morning, its stock was also issued in tokenized form on Solana and Avalanche. The article says this was not a wrapped derivative structure. Instead, ownership of the equity was recorded directly on blockchain networks rather than through a traditional centralized registrar. About $270 million in common shares were registered on-chain on the first day of trading.
The piece notes that most newly listed companies would avoid the extra regulatory attention that could come with tokenizing stock at the time of listing. Securitize chose to face that scrutiny.
What a venture term sheet actually bundles
That decision leads to the broader question raised in the article: if a public company can issue tokenized equity at listing, why could a private startup not try some version of the same model in a Series A round?
The author argues that founders do not approach venture capital firms only for cash. A term sheet usually bundles several separate services into one relationship:
- capital to fund growth,
- valuation and price setting, usually led by the lead investor in private markets,
- curation and signaling through a respected name on the cap table,
- access to customers, talent and industry networks,
- an implicit expectation of follow-on investment,
- and governance rights such as board seats, information rights, protective provisions and transfer restrictions.
According to the article, this package held together for so long because private equity stayed closed to ordinary investors. Without broad access to private share trading, price formation depended heavily on company cooperation and on institutions that could organize the whole process.
Why mature companies and Series A startups are not the same
The article also draws a clear line between Securitize and an early-stage startup. By the time Securitize tokenized its own stock, it had been operating for 10 years, had audited financials and disclosable cash flow, and ran a platform with more than $4 billion in tokenized assets. That gave markets enough information to form a valuation.
A Series A company looks very different. Outside investors often have little more than the founders’ track records, reputations and business plans. The underlying asset may still be equity, but the basis for pricing is not comparable.
That is where venture signaling still matters most. For early-stage companies, the article says the role of a VC is not just appearing on the shareholder register. It is providing credibility where public operating data does not yet exist. By contrast, later-stage private companies such as SpaceX and OpenAI are presented as better candidates for tokenized equity because their profiles already resemble public companies, with secondary trading, tender offers, perpetual contracts and broker research creating reference points before a listing.
Native equity tokens versus wrapped stock tokens
The piece says Securitize is not the first U.S. company to move listed stock onto a blockchain. Exodus did so on Algorand in 2021, and Galaxy Digital also issued on-chain equity. What makes Securitize different, according to the article, is that it became the first company to issue native on-chain equity on the first day of its public listing.
Those tokens on Solana and Avalanche carry the same legal rights as the shares trading on the NYSE, the article says. Each token includes full voting rights, dividend rights and residual claims. It is not a synthetic instrument tracking price, and not a claim routed through an offshore special purpose vehicle. The article states that Securitize’s tokenized common stock is fully equivalent to its off-chain native stock, SECZ.
Citing Vaidik’s framework, the article separates stock tokens into two broad models. One is native issuance by the issuer, such as SECZ and Exodus, where the token itself is the equity. The other is a custodial wrapped structure, such as xStocks or Robinhood stock tokens, where an SPV holds the real shares and the investor only has an economic claim. The author argues that only the first model carries full shareholder rights, which is the version relevant to how venture capital could change.
How tokenized equity could split VC services apart
Once equity can be priced continuously and transferred more freely, the article argues, the services inside a term sheet no longer need to be sold as one package.
For more mature businesses with enough information to support valuation, fundraising and price discovery can move toward markets. The article points to more than $1 billion in total value locked for tokenized equities on Ondo Global Markets. It also cites Hyperliquid, where the price of Cerebras pre-IPO perpetual contracts differed from its Nasdaq opening price by only 1.3%.
Signaling and network access still need anchor investors, the piece says, but those functions do not have to come only from large firms such as Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz. It gives Elad Gil as an example, saying his roughly $1.5 billion solo fund can lead rounds and provide brand credibility on its own.
Specialist providers are already taking other pieces. Fairmint and Pulley handle cap table management. Coinbase acquired LiquiFi in July 2025 to move into token exercise infrastructure, and acquired Echo in October 2025 for fundraising tools. Magna and Sablier are named as providers for vesting operations. The article’s point is that by 2026, founders can assemble a stack of tools that once had to be bought inside one venture relationship.
Governance is also becoming programmable. The article says Fairmint supports continuous fundraising structures similar to a SAFE, with equity conversion carried out under preset rules. Vesting lockups and settlement rules can also be enforced through smart contracts rather than relying only on legal paperwork.
Liquidity changes how employees and founders see equity
The article says deeper secondary liquidity is one of the most important consequences of tokenized private equity. Employees and early investors could gain more ways to sell holdings without waiting for an IPO.
That changes the logic around vesting and liquidity windows. In the old model, employees might wait four years for a tender offer or another structured liquidity event. In a tokenized market, they may be able to connect to a secondary market sooner.
The author does not present that as an unqualified positive. The article points to crypto examples such as Arbitrum’s ARB and Optimism’s OP, where tokens were tradable immediately and team unlocks later created concentrated selling pressure. In those cases, market prices could diverge from actual operating conditions, and founders could be pulled toward monitoring the token instead of building the product.
The article also says the analogy is imperfect because ARB and OP are governance tokens, not corporate equity, and their prices reflect ecosystem activity more than business performance. Still, it argues that the incentive conflict is similar. Rules such as Reg D 506(c), Rule 144 lockups and multi-year resale restrictions may soften concentrated selling, but they do not remove the issue entirely.
What may remain with venture firms
The article identifies follow-on financing as one of the last core VC functions without a mature tokenized replacement.
Its reason is regulatory scope. Existing frameworks mentioned in the piece — including the SEC-approved DTCC pilot, Nasdaq’s token trading system, and a related DTCC rollout expected in October — are all aimed at already listed companies such as Russell 1000 constituents. There is currently no compliant channel, the article says, for tokenized Series A equity to trade publicly on those systems.
To explain the likely end state, the author compares venture capital with the music business after streaming. Distribution became commoditized, but record labels did not disappear. Their scarce function shifted toward talent selection, brand building and judgment that data alone could not replace. Venture, the article suggests, may follow a similar path. Blockchain can handle ownership records, price discovery, transfers and scheduled vesting more efficiently than paper term sheets. What remains scarce is the investor whose reputation can help secure the next round, win enterprise customers or persuade senior talent to leave a major company for a startup.
The piece ends with a market-structure point rather than a prediction of VC collapse. Unbundling is often followed by a new round of recombination. It uses London’s 1986 Big Bang reforms as an example: broker and market-maker functions were split, then recombined by universal banks within a decade. For founders, the change is that capital, valuation, signaling and governance may no longer need to come from the same institution. Standardized parts of the term sheet may move first. Judgment may not.