Bankless - Securitize Just Went Public — Are We Still Tokenizing the World?

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Securitize has gone public, raised $400 million and tokenized its own equity, but Carlos Domingo says the real race is only beginning. He joins David to explain how Securitize makes money, why investor demand remains tokenization’s biggest bottleneck and what separates an actual onchain share from a synthetic stock wrapper. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS PREMIUM | AD-FREE & BONUS EPISODES https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Going Public 4:50 Demand Bottleneck 10:19 Real vs Synthetic 17:31 Liquidity Wins 23:43 First Movers 29:24 Trading SECZ 39:47 Spot and Perps 43:01 The $1T Goal --- RESOURCES Carlos Domingo https://x.com/carlosdomingo Securitize https://securitize.io/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, Secure Ties just completed its SPAC with Cantor Equity Partners on July 1st, racing, $400 million at a $1.25 billion pre-money valuation and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker SECZ on July 2nd. Carlos got you back on the podcast. Welcome back. We've had you on a podcast a number of times. Now it feels like you have crossed a particular line, both a finish line and yet again at another beginning line. Congratulations and welcome back on. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me again. Is the world tokenized yet?

It's not the world tokenized yet. We're really far away from tokenizing the world. We are at the very earliest stages of tokenizing. As you know, the assets on chain that are really like, you know, on chain. It's like around $30, $35 billion. So, I mean, if you think about the amount of assets that could be tokenized and in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, we're still very far away from tokenizing the world.

But, you know, things take time. right so Carlos last time we had you on the show I we drilled down into what a transfer agent is and a lot of the technicals around securitize I want to just like kind of hash that over one more time because I want to know securitize the business a little bit more in this episode now that securitize is publicly traded on the new york stock exchange talk about like what securitize is what's the nature of the business and how do you guys make money so first and foremost we're a transfer agent now is very popular to be a transfer agent or to have a transfer agent but it was not in in 2019 when we registered our transfer agent,

but a transfer agent is basically an SEC registered entity that can actually take securities from an issuer. An issueer could be an asset manager like BlackRock or could be a public trade company like us that has securities for a particular instrument, and then the transfer agent is the entity that basically keeps the record of who holds one, right, and conducts corporate actions, when there is splits, dividends, etc.

And the main difference of our transfer agent versus a traditional transfer agent is that as the underlying ledger technology where you record the ownership and all the changes of, you know, whatever happens with the securities, we use, you know, a public blockchain. And that's the, and that's the process of tokenization where you issue a token, which is basically an entry on a, on a ledger, which is a blockchain that represents this underlying security. Besides that, we are also a broker-dealer, and that makes a big difference because we can only tokenize things and put things on chain, but we can actually trade them. And when we launch our own equity on chain, we actually

launch, you know, trading of it. So this is another important thing because tokenization for the sake of putting things on chain doesn't change anything. You need to be able to do things with it. So one of the things you want to do, you want to trade them. You want to be able to, you know, pause them as collateral on DFI, et cetera. So our whole, you know, tech stack and licenses allows you to do more things beyond the pure tokenization. And in terms of how we make money, we make money as a transfer agent as a service provider. Every company that, you know, uses the transfer agent pays them fees. And those fees are usually based on how many securities you manage, et cetera.

And as a broker-dealer, we make money with transactions. So when something moves around, you know, we take a very small fee out of it. And that's the other source of monetization that we have. Also, I think I mentioned this on the podcast before, but we also acquired a fan admin business, which is now a part of our revenue, because many of the tokenized funds that we put on chain, we also do the fan administration business for them, which is another source of revenue.

And the reason we wanted to do that is because on-chain, as you know, is 24-7 and, you know, instant issuance of securities, instant liquidity, et cetera. And somebody needs to reconcile that with the underlying, which might actually not move 24-7. And that's the role of a fan admin. So we realized when we started working with BlackRock, that not having that piece of the puzzle, you know,

create a lot of friction for us. So we ended up owning that thing. So we're basically three different business within one, the transfer agent tokenization platform, the broker-dealer, and then the fund administration. Using that lens of the three different businesses, The transfer agent, that is a volume-based business. And so you just want a ton of volume being traded.

And then the broker-dealer, is that an AUM-based business? Talk about the ways that revenue scales, which each of these three lines of businesses. The transfer agent is more like either a SaaS business where you have a subscription and we have charged fees based on tiers of how much volume we manage. Or it's an AUM business as well in some cases. So we take fees based on the...

the size of the asset that we manage. The broker-dealer is the opposite. It's more a transaction-based business. So it's depending on how many transactions we, you know, how much money we raise for a fund or how many trades we do of an unchain equity, then we take transaction fees. It's not, one is recurrent,

the other one is reoccurring. And so there's actually kind of a healthy distribution of different styles of revenue from different sources. When we talk about scaling securitize, you know, more clients, more assets, what becomes the bottleneck? Or is that kind of the luxury of deploying assets on chain? Is that the technology actually scales really, really well?

And adding more clients, more overhead, doesn't really actually encumber the business. What is the bottleneck? Is it just new demand? It's actually demand, yes. The supply side, I think today, everybody wants to organize everything. And I think that there's no bottleneck on supply of asset managers, banks, issues, etc.

I want to tokenize things, the bottlenecks in the consumption side, like who is actually buying those funds, who is actually trading them on chain, etc. This is still, for the most part, crypto audience. And as you know, crypto was $4 trillion. Now it's down to like $2.45 trillion. And that's a subset of that volume. I think the big step change changes when the tokenized assets can be consumed by the traditional investors that they don't have to actually know that something is on chain

or something is tokenized to consume it. The same way I always explain this. when you were connecting to the internet, you're much younger than me, but so you probably don't remember. But when I started, you know, connecting to internet, I had to download TCPIP software in my computer and I have to buy a hardware modem and dial up

and connect to the phone, etc. So there was a friction to consume, you know, internet content. But a lot of people went through it, like today a lot of people go through the hoops of connecting wallets and signing transactions, etc. with crypto. But then at some point that became completely transparent. So I think the day that, you know,

blockchain are like to the internet, when you open your phone or you open your laptop and you're connected to a blockchain and you can transact with it without a friction. That's when everything, you know, changes completely. So you're having a conversation with a potential client and they ask you the question, what benefit does tokenizing my security if I'm a publicly traded company or my fund, if I'm a fund manager or something? What's your answer to why tokenization benefits them? How would you answer that question? It depends on the asset class. So there's not a single. answered because in some, like, let's say funds, this is going through one particular example.

So we, as you know, because we announced it on your podcast, we tokenize the tokenized treasury funds with BlackRock. And then if you look at the advantages of the tokenized version versus the non-tokenized versions, there's a ton of things that we can do that are hard to do with the non-tokenized version. We have peer-to-peer transfers. We have, you know, we do daily dividends payout by issuing more tokens that represent more shares of the fund. we're the only one of the entire black road portfolio that does the daily dividend reinvest.

And that obviously means that the fund performs better. We have on-chain liquidity so you can decredit your position 24-7, et cetera. So that's the pitch for a fund manager is basically I can take your fund and provide more functionality around the fund that makes your investors should be actually, you know, better served by you. There's also a component of efficiency, the less reconciliation issues, you know, better management, and etc. That's, in my opinion, less interesting than new functionality.

I think innovations that give you something new versus something that improves what already exists are less interesting, but it's still there. Now, for other things like equities is a different story, right? So it's about, you know, how can you reach the wallets or the people that are on crypto that want to consume things from their wallet? How can you do 24-7 trading? How do you have instant settlement, how you can, you know, borrow more efficiently by posting, you know, equities that applies to funds as well on chain?

and leverage the asset by, you know, borrowing on a Defyp Protocol, etc. So there's no one single answer which makes it complicated to explain to people because you need to look at exactly what is that they're doing to be able to provide them with their advantages. Markets don't move one asset at a time. One day it's Bitcoin, the next Nvidia, then gold, and then the S&P. But most traders are still managing their portfolio across different platforms, different accounts, and different pools of capital. BitGET just changed that.

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together. Go subscribe to this podcast. Search the DeFi report wherever you get your podcast, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now. There's two worlds that I'm seeing here when it comes to tokenized, at least stocks, and maybe it's broader than that. But there's like the Robin Hood just announced their Robin Hood tokenized stocks. We've had tokenized stocks from Ando for years now. And these people are tokenizing equities, in a sense, with different less strategies and different back-end constructions. But they're doing it independently.

They're not going to the companies that they are tokenizing the equity. They're just doing it on their own for their own internal purposes, right? Like, why does Ondo want to put stocks on chain? Well, because, you know, I might buy tokenize Google via unoswap on the Ethereum layer one because that's where I have my money. And so that's just like a providing a service to like an Ethereum retail user. Or why does like Robin Hood want tokenized stocks on chain

so they can be in Robin Hood wallet? It's not really a service being provided to the equity company itself. Correct. That's what you are doing though. You are going directly to the companies issuing the equity, issuing the security and saying like, hey, we will do this natively hooked right into the DTCC

and we will do this natively. and a stock issued by York equity on chain is a stock, not some sort of like third party representation of it. How do you think about these two worlds and what benefits does your world of the actual true high fidelity tokenization of the asset? What benefits do you have versus some of these third party models like Ando or Robin Hood?

So I own or Robohood are not the same, so don't want to mix them in the same back. But just generically, you know, when you're buying one of these derivatives or price trackers there's like, you know, 10 different ways of doing it people, et cetera. First, you're not buying the real thing.

You're buying a synthetic or a derivative. So you're taking counterparty risk with a company. You know, tokenization was meant to reduce intermediaries, not to increase the number of intermediaries, which is exactly what's happening here. You're also fragmented liquidity because none of them are fungible. Like there's like five different versions of tokenized coin or tokenized circle and all of them are different and they're not, you know,

trade and all against each other. Sometimes you don't get the same rights. You don't get, you know, access to dividends. There was one, I believe it was on the token that had a split, but they didn't minus the split on chain. So it was split on the markets. And the other token was trading at five different times different price because it didn't get the split.

So you're not part of the of the cap table, et cetera. So what we do is we give you a token that is the same share that exists in market. It's issued through the transfer agent. So you're in the books on records of the transfer agent. you show up as a social holder, you get access to all the dividends, the corporate actions, vote, governance, whatever,

you're not taking any counterpart to risk. And you're also not fragmented liquidity because these tokens, you know, when they trade on chain, they actually follow the same, you know, pricing rules that things that trade, let's say, on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. And this is very important because in the US,

from a regulatory perspective, you can't just like trade and stock at a different price that it trades in somewhere else, right? There's something called Reagan and S securities that forces, you know, pricing to be consistent. So people always know that when they're selling or buying, they're getting the best price available. And what you're doing in these platforms,

you don't know what you're getting. There's also all sort of regulatory issues with those derivatives because in some cases, they're permissionless tokens. They're not issuing the U.S. So U.S. investors are blocked, but then they flow back here. They can allow for things like, you know,

sanctioned wallets to hold the derivatives of U.S. securities. They will bypass, you know, restrictions for buyers. I think Tom Farley from Bullies the other day published that, you know, he's the CEO of Bullies and the day before the earning announcements when he knows whether the stock is going up or down, he can go and buy one of these synthetics, which is completely illegal for him to do it. But there's no controls over these things. So I do not believe that those things have a lot of, obviously now, you know, crypto, right? So people will play regulatory arbitrage as long as they can, but it's not a sustainable business model. I think the durable thing is to just, you know,

follow regulations and then, you know, work with the SEC to improve them. So we can do more things are on chain and work with the issuers for them to consent for their securities to be traded somewhere else or listed somewhere else and get their permission to use their name, their QShip number and everything. Some of those things that you listed I actually consider perks, mainly the permissionless transferability. And not that I think this is good, but if an offshore sanctioned entity can hold on to some of these tokenized stocks, again, I don't think that's good, but I appreciate that that is

possible with some of these like offshore stocks because for all securitize tokenized assets it's all KYC correct so you have to be KIC to be able to hold the asset we work with permissionless but the asset itself is permission all securities that are issued in a compliant manner are like that like companies like super state or or figure we follow regulations but you're right those things are permissionless and i think the issues isn't it's even bigger than that because some of the platforms are actually distributing these assets. They're not regulated platforms. They are offshore, you know, Chinese crypto platforms,

probably selling to Chinese people, connecting with the VPN, etc. So if people want to take regulatory risks, that's their problem. That's not how I run the company and that's not how I go here. Right, right. Yeah. I think we're just, we'll just see a growth of two different worlds.

There is the on-chain, you know, buy the books, compliant, you know, no intermediaries or intermediaries. or intermediary minimized world that you're operating in, you know, directly piped into the DTCC, you know, tokenizing the one-to-one

actual ownership. And then there's the offshore world which has like third parties and there's some like lossiness there. There's some risks there. But hey, there's like permissionlessness and no KYC. And it's like the Wild West out there.

Do you agree with that bifurcation? I agree. And that's how crypto has worked. If you, I remember when I started in crypto, you had to have KYC on Coinbase from day one. But then you could go to Binance, and I'm not trying to blame anybody here, but that was the situation.

You could go to finance and just get a username and a password and buy crypto there. And that eventually didn't last. And now every single centralized exchange has, you know, KYC and an email procedures, etc. So, and those worlds are convergent, right? Like today, every centralized exchange in crypto trades fairly, more or less the same, you know, regulatory regimes. in different parts. You've seen now recently in Europe that Mika was imposed and some people have to close because they couldn't follow the regulations, etc. So I do see these two worlds,

you know, happening temporarily, but I don't think that long term you'll see two words because the people not following regulations ultimately are going to be stopped with regulators and people don't understand that we're two years away, that potential regime change in the US and then suddenly you don't have a friendly SEC and then we go back to, you know, lawsuits and things like that with the people that are not following regulations. So. So you think the model that you're bringing to the table, the compliant, buy the books, you know, cross your T's dot your eyes version of tokenizing stocks, that will eventually push out the third party tokenization, the offshore tokenization, the less compliant or gray compliant.

You think your world pushes out the other? I think so because keep in mind that what is the advantage of the permissionless version? So the advantage is first they can distribute through unlicensed exchanges, but the moment it changes are forced to distribute securities with regulations. The exchanges do KYC already, so there's no reason why they couldn't just have a broker-dealer and well-and-distributed. And then there's now, every single DFI protocol

has adopted technology, some of that developed by us, to be able to pose those assets as collateral. And there's also on-chain trading, just connecting your wallet with USC, et cetera. Once your wallet has been well-listed after KYC, that is the same experience there. And then 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, if you want, that have regulatory risk, counterparty risk, et cetera. Yeah, I do see the liquidity issue being pretty big. Once upon a time, I thought stocks would become tokenized and issued on chain way faster than they actually did. And it turns out, like, sure, you can tokenize stocks, but like bringing in liquidity and market makers

and having that be like the epicenter of liquidity, is actually way harder. And I would imagine that there would be more demand. Like you said, the biggest bottleneck right now is just the demand side for tokenizing securities or funds or whatever on chain. And I would imagine there's just like a bunch of existing infrastructure, like the market makers and liquidity around the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ that there just doesn't exist that same level of liquidity.

Like you can go and look at all the tokenized stocks from, you know, Ondo, Robin Hood, like anywhere. and like all of them are kind of just fragmented liquidity. None of them really have any sort of like epicenter or Loki of trading activity. Granted, that's how it starts. But I would imagine that bringing like native liquidity on chain for a lot of these tokenized assets is actually one of the biggest hurdles for the tokenized real world asset ecosystem. Is my intuition correct?

Well, so if you think about market makers, you know, market makers in many cases, they're also regulated entities. And we work with Jam to do market making. for our own tokenized equity, you will not see them doing that for, let's say, on those, somebody else.

Why? Because they're taking a regulatory risk that they don't want to take because they've already, so this is the problems in the US. And then second, because it's also difficult to hedge. Because you,

you're basically training a derivative. People call them tokenizer stocks, but they're not stocks. They're something else. So then, you know, for a market maker, first they're taking a massive regulatory risk.

And then second, they're also having problems with hedging because they are derivative instruments that they don't have other markets. So I don't see that those things becoming, you know, very liquid at any time soon. While when the model, as soon as it scales,

and obviously it's harder to go issuer by issue, right? So there's no question about it. And the reason why those companies are doing that is because they can just do 100 companies at a time instead of having to go one by one. But as the issuers come on chain and you will see now that with the partnerships we have

with computers and Continental, which are two of the largest asset transfer agents and Bull is acquiring equinity. I think that you will see more issuers, you know, wanting to issue their own shares on chain, also precisely to prevent those, you know, derivatives appearing there without their permission. So one thing I, I mean, I'm a permission list, Wild West,

apologists at the very, at the very best, actually, like, that's just like the world that I like. And so when I see Robin Hood doing their tokenized stocks, their third party, like offshore tokenized stocks, and they've got, you know, alphabet. How much do they have? They have $1.3 million of alphabet. They have $1 million of Vanguard, you know, $700,000 of Micron.

No, not in large amounts, but I can't imagine, like, securitize is going to be tokenizing, like, Google's stock this year. I hope you guys do land that deal. But, like, I don't think that's going to be happening immediately. And there's, like, so many companies in the S&P 500 that I would, want to get tokenized on chain. So how far away do you think we are from securitized tokenizing like Apple

or Nvidia? Can we get there? So first, I just want to say, I believe that what Robin Hood does is regulatory compliant in the jurisdictions where they are. So I don't think that Rovings in permissionless tokens and things like that. So it's a bit of a deep nuance there. So it's still a derivative,

but it's a legally issue. And I don't know if Google will tokenize this year, but I do believe everybody will tokenized eventually and these things start small and go bigger. And Robin Hood actually is a good example of how five years ago, I remember six years ago, they started doing retail IPOs. I don't know if you remember that Robin Hood pioneer that of being able to give retail people

access to an IPO. And at the beginning, the IPOs they had were not like the most sexy ones in the industry, right? But guess what? Six years after they did the SpaceX. And I buy SpaceX of shares at the IPO price from Robin Hood. And by the way, the people that were promoting the tokenized SpaceX. IPO, they failed miserably and none of them could actually deliver anything because obviously

they were, you know, I don't know, even know what they were doing, but certainly not what Robin Hood was doing. So, but then now it became a norm, right? Like every single company and that, you know, that's an IPO, it offers a retail trance. So I think eventually there will be the tokenized version, the tokenized trench of an IPO and that we will not start with the most sexy companies, but it will kind of grow over time and ultimately every single company would do it because what will not do it? Like, there is no doubt. If you do it in a compliant way, there is no risk for you as a company. You extend your user base.

You extend your distribution. You extend your liquidity, et cetera. So it will happen. What are the lowest hanging fruits for securitized to tokenize? So if the gold standard is like some of the company's most desirable companies, like the invidias, the apples, but we have to get, you know, from A to B, what's the lowest hanging fruit for securitize to tokenize? Like, what's the sector that is most approximate?

most easy for you guys to work with today? I think there's two areas. One is crypto companies that already get the advantage of tokenization. So now that many of them are using the transfer agents we partner with, we're in discussions with some of them. I can mention names, but I think crypto companies will want to have their equity natively tokenized and controlled by them and provide the real thing to their users. The second thing is there's a ton of other companies that are kind of like retail-centric,

that they have a lot of like retail following that, you know, maybe 50% of their cap table is retail and fruit of companies is more interesting to increase the amount of retail participation on their stock. And those are also kind of like the low-hanging fruit to go after. I don't think that's trying to go to Apple today is the right answer. These are very large conservative companies

that are not going to be first-movers in something new. If you think about Apple, they still don't even have like wallets or they don't touch anything in crypto, right? So what would they tokenize their stock? I don't think. I think you need to go to the companies that are tech forward that are already doing things

in the crypto space or, you know, crypto JSON, etc. And those are the first ones that will adopt this. What about funds? Like not equities or not public traded companies,

but like other vehicles. What are non-equity vehicles that are like pretty solid candidates for tokenization? I think funds are already in a different stage of adoption because, you know, you got two years ago,

BlackRock tokenized a fund and BlackRock is the large asset manager. So we already got the Apple of the fans. BlackRock and then we got Apollo and then we got, you know, BNY and then I know the competitors have Franklin Templeton

tokenized and wisdom tree, etc. So I think that on the fund space is much better because you already got the quality ones doing it. So it's easier now that discussion with the fans than with the issueres. tokenized stocks. You said, don't know, it's doing it for years. I don't think so. I think they just started like a year ago

or something like that. on the on the on cracking economy which one was the first ones and now there's like five different companies doing it but it's very, very early days. Fans I think we are like already in the you know, two to three years cycle

where some of the large asset managers have already tokenized is how much easier conversation. One of the big things that you guys did when you guys spacked public was you guys tokenize your own stock tokenize your own equity which makes sense. Obviously you would do that.

Like that's what you do. You would and you're going public. It makes perfect sense. Talk about what that just, I don't know what the question is there, but I just want to talk about it. Like, talk about what that was like behind the scenes and the strategy and then where is a ticker, S-E-C-Z trading.

Did you have to talk to Coinbase and crack in to get these lists? Talk about that experience. So we did two things. First, we allow shareholders to tokenize their equity. So through the trans region of our SPAG is Continental and then Securitized partner with Continental to be their tokenization arm. So through Continental when you were receiving your shares of Securitize, the last few days before we were listed.

You got a notice saying, if you want to tokenize, you can just let us know. And we offer two different chains. Avalence and so on it to start, but we're planning on expanding. And then you could, you know, opt to receive your shares in tokenized form. And I believe there was like, I can remember how many shares, like 200,000 shares or something like that that opted to tokenize. So now it became the largest, you know, native,

non-native tokenized asset, including the non-native ones. I think the only other native one is figure. which is around 200 million or something like that. I don't remember. I think we are like 250 million. But not only we allow them to tokenize, but we also turn on trading. We're doing it in Solana for the time being

because we're working with Jump and Jump has a prop AIMM technology in Solana. And that part of the trading was actually a lot more complicated than most people think because we are doing trading following all US regulations, which unfortunately for, you know,

for public equities are very cumbersome in terms of pricing, right? because as I mentioned, there is something that most people don't know, but there's some rules in public markets in the U.S. that if you, you can buy shares in multiple places, right? There's tons of venues where traders can actually buy shares. But if one place they're offering you $101 and the other one is offering you $102, the broker-dealer has the obligation to route the trade to the one that offers the best price,

is something called it, the national best bid and offer in BBO. So when you trade on chain, you're not part of the national market system. you're outside of DTCC, you're not using DTC, you're not using exchanges. So we are basically trading on chain where you basically swap USDC by tokenized sexes, and then we swap it. But we have to guarantee that we're offering the best price. So that means we need to get, you know, price fits of what's the actual price trading on this MBVO. Jam also gets that.

Then we match the trade. We confirm that it's within the range that is regulatory acceptable. and then we offer you the trade. But at least you know that you're swapping USC by tokenized securitized and you always get the best price. And that has a degree of complexity that we had to go through that most people don't realize, but this is why we could do it in a legal way from the one. That seems very complex.

Are you bridging both worlds via this apparatus? Or are you like servicing the best price based off of what's available on chain? How do you determine best price in the on-chain or crypto context if it's completely segregated from like the track? You have to fetch the price from. So this MBBO, this National Best Bitter and Offer price, it's actually offered by by a group of companies that are called SIPs, securities information processors.

So they're kind of like an Oracle. They spit out of price. We act as the Oracle. Like we fix the price off-chain and fit it on-chain to jump. and then JAM gets their price from a different provider, and then we make sure that, you know, when the trade, when the swap of the USDC by the equity happens on chain, and we settle.

It happens at at least that price. Because we also have to report every single trade to FINRA. So we'll verify that we're actually following the regulation. So like Trump being a market maker on chain, they have to offer a price, that price or higher, correct? 100%. Yeah. Okay. Now, the interesting thing is that this,

this whole thing of this Reagan MS securities and MBBO, this is something that happened in 2005 with the idea that this will kind of consolidate markets and everybody will trade at the same price. And actually the opposite happened. So now in the U.S. markets, there's like tons of different venues that they can actually try to offer a better price

because they know they're forced to route the trade to them. So it actually has fragmented, you know, markets. And Paul Atkins, which is kind of the current chair of the SEC, he's never been a fan of this. I believe when he was in 2005 a commissioner he dissent with this approach. And then very recently the SEC has published a note saying that they're trying to eliminate those rules.

There are two rules called 611, 610. This is very technical regulatory, so hold on with me, but basically this rule it basically tells you that you have to follow this price, right? That you have to always offer this price. And if you think about crypto doesn't have that, right? So Coinbase and Binance trade completely separately,

but they always trade at the same price. And if this price discrepancy market makers fixes that. So that kind of best price concept doesn't exist. It happens emergently. The market just does that. Exactly. So they are trying to eliminate this. I really, most crypto people miss this because it's a change in the national markets

that is going to trickle down as an advantage for crypto because you'll be able to then, you know, not have to follow those price fees. that it gets very tricky on chain because obviously as you know, you know these blogs and then you can be somebody can front run it. So there's a lot of all the typical complexity

of how things are fed on chain and how many, you know, how many seconds it takes to, you know, do a blog, etc. So they are going to eliminate this. That's what the SEC has proposed. It's not going to be immediate. It's going to take them sometime probably a year or longer

until it gets eliminated. So for the time being, we are not working with these rules, but with the hope that this will get eliminated over time and it would become simpler to trade on chain. Yeah, it seems like it would be a boon to your job, and securitize and really compliant tokenized assets on chain if they just didn't have to deal with that

because it sounds complex and hard. Correct. It will be much better and it will provide, it will make it cheaper because, by the way, to get these prices, you have to pay for it. So these are not two things. Yeah, yeah, of course. They're like, you know.

Well, we just created an intermediary. The off-teen equivalent of the crypto oracles, right? Right, right, right. Yeah, wow, it's off-chain chain link. Exactly. So you have to pay for them and then, you know, it makes it costly. You also have to display the price for the user so the user knows what's the price that it's going to get and you have to guarantee that you can do this price.

So maybe you can, maybe a trade can fail because at some point in time you've told the user you're going to buy a 10.5 and then the price move and there's a 10.6 and then you can't execute it and things like that. So that's complexity and this is what people didn't realize. of what we built, which is very complex, but complies with the rules. But, you know, hopefully these things will simplify our time. Well, why did SECZ, the tokenized version of Securitize, launch on Avalanche and Solana? So we wanted to be in two chains, one and an EBM chain and the other one and on a VEM chain.

We've had partnerships with both Avalanche and Solana for many years. Avalanche was the first company we worked with to tokenize the KKR fund back in the days. We also have the approval in Europe for our worker dealer on Avalanche. because Avalence has something that, again, people don't realize, but it has deterministic settlement. And the terministic settlement, when you talk about securities, it's important because if you settle a trade and you report it to the SEC, you don't want to have to come back later and say,

well, by the way, that trade ended up failing, and then I have to unwind it, and it adds an unnecessary complexity. So, Lanna, this is where the prop AIMM technology that JAM uses to much the trades and to provide this continuous price update, so they can always price at the price that. they have to do. This is a jam technology that we're leveraging. We had to build some things around it to fit this price from national markets, but it was available there and Solana is already doing that for crypto. And their prop AIM actually provides a better slipage

for crypto assets already with their prop AIMM. So that technology was available there. And then since we partner with them as a market maker, that's what it makes sense. And we've obviously done a lot of things over the years with Solana. Sona has also very fast, you know, block size. block time, which is advantages for this because, as I mentioned, you have to be feeding this price constantly, et cetera. So it just made sense to do it with those, those blockchains for the time being and we hope to expand in the future. When you think about tokenizing stocks on Ethereum, does the tokenizing stock on the Ethereum layer one provide any specific or unique challenges because of the way that Ethereum is built?

I think on Ethereum, you have to deal with, you know, the block time. Yeah, 12 seconds, yeah. And then you have to deal with MEDE issues, right? that people can front run it. So those are two things that there's some people. Why is it? Why is it relevant if only people that are trading the stock are KYC'd? And so like you can't have the average, like Jared from Subway,

if he wanted to trade, you know, securitized stocks, he would need to KYC with you guys, right? Correct. But the execution is on chain. It's all on chain. So on your KYC, the only thing that does the KICs is it while list wallets. So those wallets can trade on chain in a permissionless manner. So once the wallets are permission,

are, are whitelisted, and that's it. The rest functions exactly the same as any other, you know, on chain trading. So there's all the companies working on kind of similar prop AMM technology that Jam has in Solana. So prop AMM technology is really important for you guys because that allows you to be compliant because it keeps the execution compliant? It keeps the execution in a tight range of price. Yeah, I just listened to a podcast this morning. that we're talking about saying prop AIMs are not AMM.

So they're not like automated market makers. There's an actual market maker behind, but they're kind of working a RFQ style pricing that, you know, they can just have a very tight spread. And tight spreads are mandatory for equities because you have to follow this, you know, price and growth for their national markets. So sorry. So I interrupted you.

Faster block times out of Ethereum would be good for securitize. What else? Faster block times and then having the right property. We don't build a, the prop event technology, we act as a broker-dealer that was built by JAMB. So we will have to have the similar kind of tech stack built on top of Ethereum for us to be able to do that. We're not looking at, that's why I was listening to this podcast this morning, who else is doing pro-MMs in which change, etc.,

because obviously the plan is to expand and to bring this to Avalanche first and then to other chains, but we will need that kind of tech, yeah. So this is like a request for startup or a request for product from Securitize, which is like you need a prop AMM on Ethereum. You have a good RFQ or ProMMM that works well that works in Ethereum and other technologies. Reach out to us. We'll love to talk to you.

We want to expand training as many spaces as possible. As I mentioned, this doesn't fragment liquidity. It actually increases liquidity. It's like going back to what you were asking people, one of the questions that issuers ask is like, oh, is this going to fragment liquidity? Or when we announced this project with the New York Stock Exchange, you remember we were with Michael on your podcast.

And they were one of the, questions was, is this going to fragment liquidity? It's going to increase liquidity. And both Michael and I answer the same thing. I believe this will increase liquidity, right? Because it will increase the amount of market participants that are there from around the world. But then you need to have it in as many places as possible as crypto. Unfortunately, it's a fragmented world with many blockchains.

So the hope is that we can bring this into multiple chains as well. If the SEC does away with the rule about the best price rule that we were talking about earlier, if it does away with this, do you still need the price? drop AMM on Ethereum or are there constrained relaxed? I mean, you still want to try to offer customers the best price possible. Sure. And then also keep in mind that market makers are also heading within national markets. But it obviously will become less restrictive.

But we're still, unfortunately, far away from this being a reality. I do believe that it will take a year or longer to do it. Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free bankless podcast fee. Did you know that there is a premium bankless RSS? feed. The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry, questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it. If you signed up for bankless premium, and there is a link in the show notes to get started.

Cheers to a good 2026. One subject that people are pretty excited about are equity perps. Are you talking to any perp platforms? Or what do you think about getting securitize assets into a perp platform? We are talking to perp companies. I think that perps and spot markets are very complementary. They're two different things. That's most people that when people say,

oh, why do you want tokenized equities if you can trade perps? Well, perps are a different thing. You're training perpetual futures. You're training futures, essentially. You have to post collateral. You can be liquidated, except. So it's not the same as I buy the stock and I hold it. And when I want to sell it, I sell it.

So you're taking in a different risk. They're leverage, et cetera. But perps need spot markets, right? Because perps need to feed the market from somewhere else. So all these perps that are trading today, you know, equities, they don't have a 24-7 spot market. Well, the perps sometimes trades 24-7. Now, we just talked to a perp platform that he was saying,

he was telling us that, I'm not sure. I can disclose the name, but that they actually are not allowing to update the funding rate during the weekends because they don't have spot price. And then we just don't know what the funding rate should be because there's no spot price, right?

So perps today are great innovation that works very well for markets that have a continuous spot market that they can actually fit the market price all the time. When you don't have that, then perps are less efficient. So I do believe that these two things are very complementary and that as we get more native tokenized equities, you'll also be able to post them as collateral for perps.

You'll also be able to get a better pricing for the perps 24-7, et cetera. So I think the innovations that are happening, that are kind of converging from originally crypto innovations like perps for Bitcoin, etc, into the traditional equities markets are super interesting. And there's another thing that is interesting. You know, in crypto people do this basis trade where they can just like, you know, buy the spot and short the future or the other

around and not traders. so I'm not like super familiar with how they used to do at the beginning. That can actually happen as well on equity markets. And I was talking to a trader the other day. He was telling me that if you had efficient, you know, per markets and spot markets on chain for things like SpaceX, there's 100 basis points difference today that you could actually make. So that's, that will increase trading in both platforms on the per platform and on the spot platform. So I think it's this perps converging with, you know, spot markets are a very interesting innovation.

Yeah, that's the clearest path that I see for tokenized stocks, tokenized equities or tokenization broadly, growing in liquidity is having the full internal basis trade, like complete on chain. As we've seen, like tokenized stocks have gotten some amount of liquidity, you know, sporadically around wherever, whoever the issuer is or wherever the venue is. But it hasn't been amazing and we definitely want more liquidity.

And I think like tokenized equities or tokenized stocks inside of per platforms where the spot is, and the perp is in the same venue, is actually a massive unlock for the industry. It's a massive unlock for perps and for the actual tokenized asset itself. What we need to do is get more real tokenized assets because we can get the oil issue.

But if the perp is trading the asset, but the spot market is a derivative, you're not like getting necessarily the same instrument on the same price. Securitized when you guys spacked into the market last week, you guys also raised $400 million. What are you going to spend that money on? You're going shopping?

What are you going shopping for? You're going shopping, yeah. Well, so I've mentioned this many times. Like we don't need $400 million to run the company. By the way, having $400 million is actually an insurance policy from company perspective because now we don't need to think about running out of money for foreseeable many, many years to come, hopefully. So this is really good. But obviously, we need to put the money to work.

Like we kind of just like a bit on the bank. So there's a number of things. We're looking at not looking at necessarily buying a competitor. I think that it's too much overlap in terms of tech, et cetera. was still the largest platform. So buying, you know, the second or the third or fourth or whatever, like that's probably not where I want to spend the money. I think that it's more interesting to add more capabilities, you know, things like, you know,

training related to stuff that what do we need to complement, you know, tokenized equities or what do we need to complement, you know, tokenized funds that adds value to or to our customers of a fan admin business. We have 650 digital asset funds. Like what else are they're buying? Like, what can we do to continue expanding the product portfolio? this is where we're looking and then we're also looking

at international opportunities. We've been very US-centric, which I believe was the right thing to do, but now that we're bigger, I think it's looking at what is how can we do in other jurisdictions from our licensing perspective and what other interesting things are there

is something else we're looking at. Carlos, let's zoom forward about 12 months. So it's July 2027. What does the world of securitized tokenized assets look like? How many more are there? how much more AUM or TVL, what everyone would use?

What does that world look like? What are your goals for the next 12 months? I don't know. So 12 months is a very specific number. I don't know if exactly 12 months where we will be, but if you look at, let's say, three years, we give me like a bit of a side. I think first I think that on the fund side,

the strategy is not to bring as many fans as possible because we're also the distributor. So we don't want to have like 10 funds that are very similar doing the same thing with two different asset managers. This is why we're very selective of who we work with. and we're trying to kind of build a portfolio of different assets that complement each other. So we have treasuries today. We have AAA bonds, CLOs that, you know, have a slightly higher yield than treasuries.

We have credit. So there's a bunch of, you know, assets in between that are higher yield, still liquid, etc, that we're looking at from an asset perspective. On the equity side is a different story because every equity is different, right? So it's not the same tokenized securityized and, you know, tokenize Apple or tokenicels. there we want to get as many as possible. So we are activating now the partnerships with the transfer agents to

getting a pipeline of customers that we can bring them chain and then make sure, as you said, that there's liquidity on chain. This is the most important thing. There's liquidity and then there's complementary with the perps, etc. If you look at where the projections are from the industry, the projections are all over the place. Like every single, you know, you have from like

$2 trillion and the people saying, you know, $30 trillion. I don't think we get to $30 trillion. million dollars tomorrow. I think within, we are like 30 or 35 billion or whatever. So if we get to a trillion dollars within the next three years, let's say, I think that's a massive milestone. And I think the trillion dollar number is kind of like what kind of moves the needle from a size perspective.

And if we get to a trillion dollars, I think, you know, we don't need to get a huge market share. Let's say we stay lower than we're now at 10% market share of one trillion dollars. There will be $100 billion in a UM plus transactions, which is, you know, 20 times what we have today on the platform. So that's kind of like the North Star of how we get to the trillion dollars. And by the way, this is not just me. It has to be collectively the industry, you know, pushing forward.

And the fact that now there's so many people doing tokenization, even if I might not agree with certain models. But this is a good thing, right? Because we were by ourselves for a very long time in the industry, and that doesn't help anybody. So, well, Carlos, you have a whole entire world to tokenize. So I'll let you get back at it. Thanks for coming on the show today.

All right. Thanks for having me again. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. is risky, you can lose what you put in, but nonetheless, this frontier is not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the bikeless journey. Thanks a lot.