Platform — The tokenization of real-world assets requires a stack of regulated infrastructure that crypto-native firms cannot easily replicate and traditional financial institutions are not built to provide. An SEC-registered transfer agent to maintain the legal record of investor ownership. An SEC-registered Alternative Trading System to facilitate secondary trading. KYC/AML onboarding at institutional scale. Compliance embedded at the token protocol level. A client portal that non-technical institutional investors can actually use. Securitize is the company that built this stack end-to-end — and BlackRock’s $47 million strategic investment in 2024 validated that assessment at the highest level of the institutional market.
Overview
Securitize, Inc. was founded in 2017 by Carlos Domingo and Jamie Finn, initially as a platform for security token offerings during the initial wave of blockchain-based capital markets activity. The firm is headquartered in New York with operations in Miami, and has evolved from an STO platform into the dominant end-to-end infrastructure provider for institutional tokenized assets in the United States. Securitize holds two critical regulatory licenses: SEC registration as a Transfer Agent and SEC registration as an Alternative Trading System (broker-dealer) — making it the only company in the US that can issue, administer, and facilitate secondary trading of digital securities under a unified regulated framework.
The Transfer Agent registration is foundational. Under US securities law, every issuer of registered securities must maintain shareholder records through a registered transfer agent — the legal keeper of who owns what. For tokenized funds like BUIDL (BlackRock) or SCOPE (Hamilton Lane), Securitize serves as the transfer agent, meaning the on-chain token records it maintains constitute the legally authoritative record of investor ownership. This is not merely administrative: it gives Securitize’s records legal primacy that blockchain data alone does not have, satisfying the regulatory requirements that govern investment companies under the 1940 Act and alternative investments under Regulation D.
The Alternative Trading System registration enables Securitize Markets — the secondary trading platform where investors in tokenized assets can buy and sell positions. Private securities (Regulation D offerings) are illiquid by design; investors cannot freely resell them for six months to a year after purchase and must find qualified buyers. Securitize Markets provides a regulated venue where secondary transactions can occur, with compliance checks (accredited investor verification, transfer restrictions) enforced programmatically at the token level before any trade executes.
The client roster defines Securitize’s market position. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund uses Securitize as its transfer agent and issuance platform — a relationship that is simultaneously the firm’s most significant revenue contract and its most powerful commercial endorsement. KKR, Apollo Global Management, Hamilton Lane, Ares Capital, and WisdomTree all use Securitize to issue and administer their tokenized fund products. This concentration of institutional asset managers reflects both Securitize’s technical capabilities and the network effect that develops when the largest players in a market segment all use the same infrastructure provider: new entrants gravitate toward the platform where their potential investors are already registered.
The ERC-1400 token standard — which Securitize helped develop — is the technical foundation for the compliance infrastructure embedded in every token the platform issues. ERC-1400 extends the standard ERC-20 token with compliance controls: transfer restrictions that prevent tokens from moving to addresses that have not completed KYC/AML verification, jurisdictional blocks that prevent transfers to restricted geographies, lock-up enforcement that programmatically prevents transfers during restriction periods, and partition functions that allow a single token type to have multiple compliance rule sets for different investor classes. These controls make the tokens themselves compliance-aware, dramatically reducing the manual compliance workload for token transfers at scale.
Carlos Domingo, Securitize’s CEO, has consistently argued that the tokenization infrastructure market is winner-take-most rather than winner-take-all, but that first-mover advantages in institutional relationships compound over time. Each large-scale fund deployment on Securitize adds to the investor registry (accredited investors who have completed onboarding), increases the secondary market liquidity pool on Securitize Markets, and generates transaction data that improves the platform’s compliance and risk management capabilities.
Key Metrics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Platform AUM (Tokenized Assets) | $4B+ (2025) |
| BlackRock Investment | $47M (May 2024) |
| Revenue Growth | 841% (2025, self-reported) |
| Regulatory Licenses | SEC Transfer Agent + SEC ATS (broker-dealer) |
| Key Clients | BlackRock, KKR, Apollo, Hamilton Lane, Ares, WisdomTree |
| Token Standard | ERC-1400 (compliance-embedded) |
| Secondary Market | Securitize Markets |
| CEO | Carlos Domingo |
| Founded | 2017 |
| HQ | New York / Miami |
Tokenization Activity
Securitize’s operational workflow for a tokenized fund issuance illustrates why the firm is difficult to displace. When Hamilton Lane wants to issue a tokenized credit fund on Polygon, Securitize handles investor onboarding (KYC/AML verification, accredited investor certification, subscription agreement execution via DocuSign integration), issues ERC-1400 tokens on the designated blockchain, maintains the cap table in real-time as subscriptions and redemptions occur, coordinates with the fund administrator for NAV reporting, and provides the investor portal through which investors view their positions and receive fund communications. This is not a single product — it is an integrated stack of regulated services that would require Hamilton Lane to maintain multiple vendor relationships and operational processes if Securitize did not exist.
The BlackRock investment — $47 million in May 2024 — did not merely provide capital; it created a strategic alignment that other potential competitors must weigh carefully before building competing infrastructure. Any institution evaluating whether to build or buy tokenization infrastructure must now consider that competing with Securitize means competing with BlackRock’s network and commercial interests.
Securitize’s expansion into wealth management distribution — connecting tokenized fund products with registered investment advisers and their clients — represents the next phase of the platform’s growth strategy. The RIA channel manages $8+ trillion in client assets in the US; if even 2-3% of that flows into tokenized alternatives, the volume flowing through Securitize’s infrastructure would dwarf current platform AUM.
Investment Relevance
Securitize is privately held, but its strategic significance for public market investors is substantial. The BlackRock equity position creates correlation between Securitize’s success and BlackRock’s valuation. More broadly, Securitize’s platform AUM growth is the single most reliable real-time indicator of institutional tokenized asset market growth in the US — it is the infrastructure layer through which the largest institutional token issuances flow.
A potential Securitize IPO, widely anticipated as the tokenization market matures, would create a pure-play public market proxy for the institutional RWA sector — an investment vehicle currently unavailable to public market investors.
Related Entities
- BlackRock — $47M investor and BUIDL fund client
- Hamilton Lane — Board member and major fund client
- KKR — PE fund tokenization client
- Apollo Global Management — Credit fund tokenization client
- tZERO — Competitor ATS for digital securities secondary trading