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Securitize's CEO Says Public Companies Have Lost Track of Their Own Shareholders. His Fix Is an Onchain Register

Writer: Shawn Jhanji
Shawn Jhanji
1 day ago
3 min read
Carlos Domingo, co-founder and chief executive of Securitize, has a blunt pitch for public companies: you probably do not know who owns your own stock, and blockchain can fix that. He is using his own company's shares to make the case. Securitize listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ on 2 July 2026, and on the same day tokenised 295 million dollars of its own common stock on the Solana and Avalanche blockchains, the largest tokenised equity event to date. The company is pitching onchain records as the authoritative shareholder register for public companies, replacing a system built around the Depository Trust Company that Domingo argues obscures who actually holds a company's shares. The problem Domingo is describing is structural rather than novel. When an investor buys stock through a brokerage, they do not appear on the issuing company's books as a direct owner. Instead, the DTC holds shares in street name through a chain of custodians and brokers, so the company sees a handful of large institutions on its register rather than the investors who actually own the business. That makes routine corporate actions, dividends, proxy votes, basic shareholder communication, more complicated than they need to be. Securitize, which is itself an SEC-registered transfer agent, wants blockchain to serve as the official ownership ledger instead, giving issuers direct control over their capitalisation tables

Carlos Domingo, co-founder and chief executive of Securitize, has a blunt pitch for public companies: you probably do not know who owns your own stock, and blockchain can fix that. He is using his own company's shares to make the case.


Securitize listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ on 2 July 2026, and on the same day tokenised 295 million dollars of its own common stock on the Solana and Avalanche blockchains, the largest tokenised equity event to date. The company is pitching onchain records as the authoritative shareholder register for public companies, replacing a system built around the Depository Trust Company that Domingo argues obscures who actually holds a company's shares.


The problem Domingo is describing is structural rather than novel. When an investor buys stock through a brokerage, they do not appear on the issuing company's books as a direct owner. Instead, the DTC holds shares in street name through a chain of custodians and brokers, so the company sees a handful of large institutions on its register rather than the investors who actually own the business. That makes routine corporate actions, dividends, proxy votes, basic shareholder communication, more complicated than they need to be. Securitize, which is itself an SEC-registered transfer agent, wants blockchain to serve as the official ownership ledger instead, giving issuers direct control over their capitalisation tables.


The company's April 2026 partnership with Computershare, the world's largest transfer agent and record-keeper for around 60 per cent of S&P 500 companies, gave the pitch institutional weight. Together the two introduced Issuer-Sponsored Tokens, a digital wrapper around existing shares that preserves voting rights, dividend entitlements and the usual legal protections while moving the ownership record onto a blockchain. Securitize currently manages some 4 to 5 billion dollars in tokenised assets, a rounding error against the roughly 70 trillion dollar US equities market, but a meaningful proof point for the model.


Why this travels beyond the US: the exact question Domingo is raising, which record is authoritative when a tokenised representation and an official register diverge, is the same question we have spent the past several weeks pressing on in a UK context. Our recent coverage of SEIS and tokenisation set out what could be a settled position that a tokenised seed share can retain its tax relief provided the underlying ordinary share is issued and filed conventionally, with company register and Companies House remaining the source of truth and the token acting as a tradable representation sitting on top. The US does not have a Companies House equivalent, its system runs through DTC and private transfer agents instead, but Securitize's bet that a blockchain register can sit alongside, and eventually inside, the official record is functionally the same architecture question UK issuers, custodians and HMRC will need to answer as tokenised private shares scale here.


Securitize's SECZ listing is now a live test case worth watching for how US regulators treat the divergence question in practice.


Key Takeaways

  • Securitize tokenised 295 million dollars of its own stock on Solana and Avalanche when it listed on the NYSE on 2 July 2026, the largest tokenised equity event so far.

  • CEO Carlos Domingo is positioning onchain shareholder registers as a fix for the opacity created by the DTC's street name holding system.

  • The Computershare partnership, announced in April 2026, introduced Issuer-Sponsored Tokens that preserve full shareholder rights while moving the ownership record onchain.

  • Securitize manages roughly 4 to 5 billion dollars in tokenised assets against a 70 trillion dollar US equities market, meaningful as a proof point rather than in scale.

  • The underlying question, which record is authoritative when token and register diverge, mirrors this publication's ongoing SEIS and tokenisation coverage on Companies House's role as the UK's source of truth.


This is general information, not investment, tax or legal advice.


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