New York Stock Exchange facade for a story about onchain IPO infrastructure.

Cantor and Securitize Want to Put the IPO Itself Onchain

By Isaac • July 18, 2026 1:34 pm • Comments

Tokenized stocks are no longer a thought experiment. The harder question is whether blockchain can get into the room before those shares begin trading.

Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize now want to move the technology upstream, to the point where a public company actually raises money.

The firms announced an agreement Wednesday to support initial public offerings and follow-on stock sales with blockchain-based infrastructure.

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It is a much bigger ambition than putting a digital wrapper around shares that already exist.

Cantor will bring the investment-banking machinery: equity capital markets, trading and access to companies preparing to sell stock. Securitize will supply the regulated infrastructure to issue, distribute and service tokenized securities.

If the model works, blockchain would become part of the offering itself rather than an extra trading layer bolted on later.

Securitize and Cantor said the goal is to let public companies raise capital onchain while remaining inside the established framework for traditional securities offerings, including the regulated intermediaries that make those deals possible.

That last part matters.

The agreement is not an attempt to replace securities law with a smart contract. It pairs a large Wall Street underwriting and trading operation with a company that already runs regulated broker-dealer, transfer-agent and alternative-trading-system businesses across the security’s life cycle.

Securitize would manage the digital security through issuance and distribution, then continue servicing it after the sale. Its broker-dealer affiliate would participate in the offering and settlement rather than leaving those functions to an unregulated protocol with no direct role for the issuer.

That structure is designed to preserve the familiar public-market framework while changing the ownership rail underneath it.

The potential gains are more transparent records, fewer operational handoffs and a cleaner connection between the issuer and investors who choose tokenized ownership.

The companies have not named an issuer, a first offering or a launch date.

They also have not identified which blockchain would carry a future deal, what asset would be used for settlement or whether investors would receive a tokenized allocation alongside ordinary brokerage shares.

This is a pathway, not a completed onchain IPO.

Even so, the division of labor is revealing.

Cantor would continue doing the work an investment bank normally does around an offering. Securitize would handle the digital ownership layer, with its SEC-registered broker-dealer affiliate expected to participate in the offering and settlement process.

In other words, neither company is promising to make the underwriter, the transfer agent or investor checks disappear. They are trying to make the security itself compatible with blockchain rails from the start.

That is different from much of today’s tokenized-stock market.

Some products give investors economic exposure through a separate vehicle, a synthetic token or an offshore wrapper. Those instruments can track a stock without placing the investor directly onto the issuer’s official ownership record.

CoinDesk reported, citing a Securitize spokesperson, that the Cantor model is meant to be issuer-sponsored. The token would represent the actual security, not a wrapper, special-purpose vehicle or synthetic position created outside the company’s capital structure.

That distinction is the center of the story.

A token that sits outside the issuer’s official structure is mainly a new way to trade exposure. A token created as part of the offering can become a new way to issue the share, record its owner, distribute it and service it after the sale.

The legal rights still come from the security and its offering documents. The blockchain changes the recordkeeping and movement of ownership, not the voting, disclosure and transfer obligations attached to the share.

It also places responsibility on the issuer and its regulated agents. If a transfer is restricted, a wallet is ineligible or an ownership record must be corrected, the token cannot operate as if those rules vanished.

That is a less radical model than anonymous stock tokens, but it is much closer to something a public company could defend to regulators and shareholders.

Securitize has been building the regulatory pieces needed to attempt that job.

A May filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission described expanded FINRA approvals for Securitize Markets that make the new agreement more than a software-only proposal for public markets.

Those permissions allow the broker-dealer to custody tokenized securities and take part as an underwriter or selling-group member in initial and secondary tokenized offerings. Securitize also said the approvals support atomic settlement between tokenized securities and cash equivalents inside its regulated operation.

FINRA approved those broker-dealer capabilities. It did not approve the Cantor agreement, a particular blockchain or any future public offering.

The distinction is important because “onchain IPO” can make the project sound much further along than it is when no issuer or transaction has been announced.

The permissions make the idea operationally credible, but they do not create investor demand or supply a company willing to use the new route. Those are commercial questions that regulatory capability alone cannot settle.

They also do not guarantee that every step of a future deal will settle on one chain. Traditional clearing, banking and custody systems may remain part of the transaction even when the security has an onchain ownership record.

Securitize has the permissions and market plumbing. Cantor has the banking relationships and distribution network. What the pair does not yet have in public is the company willing to be first.

Securitize has at least tested the concept on itself.

The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as SECZ on July 2 after completing a business combination with a Cantor-sponsored special-purpose acquisition company.

Securitize said in its listing-day announcement that eligible U.S. investors could access tokenized SECZ through its regulated platform on Avalanche and Solana.

The company described those tokens as the same common stock trading on the NYSE, not a synthetic product or a separate share class. Access remained subject to onboarding, identity checks, jurisdictional eligibility and securities-law restrictions.

That launch provides a useful proof point, but it does not answer every question facing an outside issuer.

Securitize was able to design the ownership structure around its own technology and corporate strategy. An outside company, its counsel and its existing market partners may be considerably less willing to adopt a new recordkeeping path on day one.

That makes SECZ a demonstration, not a template every issuer can copy unchanged.

A company choosing this route would have to decide how much of an offering goes onchain, which investors can participate, how wallets and brokerage accounts interact and what happens when shares move between conventional and tokenized records.

Liquidity matters too.

A technically elegant token is not automatically a liquid public market. Investors need approved venues, market makers, custody, reliable pricing and a clean path back to traditional accounts.

There is also a practical tension between wider digital distribution and the restrictions that come with a regulated securities offering.

Securitize and Cantor describe access to a global onchain investor base as one of the potential benefits. That does not mean every wallet can buy.

Registration rules, sanctions screening, know-your-customer checks and local eligibility requirements still control who may participate.

The near-term opportunity may be less dramatic than a 24-hour global stock market and more useful than the slogan suggests.

Blockchain can give an issuer a continuously updated ownership record. It can reduce handoffs among separate systems. It can make delivery of the security and payment occur together rather than leaving one side waiting on the other.

Those improvements are not as flashy as deleting Wall Street from the process. Cantor’s presence makes clear that deletion is not the plan.

The bank is betting that traditional capital formation can absorb new settlement rails without surrendering the rules, relationships and investor protections that make a public offering possible.

Securitize is betting that the token can become the official share rather than a shadow version of it.

Now the agreement needs a real transaction.

The first issuer will determine whether this is merely an attractive framework or a repeatable way to raise public capital. The offering’s chain, investor access, settlement design and secondary liquidity will matter more than the announcement.

Until then, the most important change is where the conversation has moved.

Tokenized equities began as a question about where existing stocks could trade. Cantor and Securitize are asking whether the stock can be born onchain in the first place.

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