Tokenisation: from concept to infrastructure

In the news

Two tokenisation platforms are set to go public in 2026, Securitize, via a $1.25 billion Cantor Fitzgerald SPAC, and tZERO, through a traditional IPO.

Today, let’s focus on Securitize, a firm that has already tokenised more than $4 billion in assets and handled BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, the largest real-world-asset (RWA) tokenisation to date. Real institutions. Real flow.

Securitize is now tokenising its own equity and listing it on its own rails. If this succeeds, every banker will take notice.

Its $225 million PIPE includes Arche, Borderless Capital, and Hanwha, while ARK, BlackRock, Hamilton Lane, Morgan Stanley, and Tradeweb are rolling their existing stakes. These are market-structure players, not speculative crypto investors.

The backdrop is remarkable. Circle rose 167% on debut. Gemini and Bullish both listed this year. The GENIUS Act passed in July. Should shutdown ends, the Structure Bill is announced for Q1. The window is open, the regulatory picture is clearing, and capital is flowing.

Cantor Fitzgerald, the architect behind the Securitize SPAC, is not known for symbolic deals. It is simultaneously structuring a $4 billion SPAC with Blockstream Capital, following a $3.6 billion venture with SoftBank and Tether in April. Combined, Cantor’s 2025 crypto-linked transactions could reach $10 billion. The firm is building a portfolio that treats both Bitcoin and tokenised securities as core future market infrastructure, not side bets, positioning itself across the entire stack, from Bitcoin treasury companies to tokenisation platforms.

The infrastructure moment

Regulation has shifted. The market is receptive. Capital is moving.

I’ve been betting on tokenisation for years. The vision was always clear, the infrastructure wasn’t. You can’t tokenise securities at scale when custody is fragile, settlement rails don’t exist, and regulators can’t decide whether a token is, or isn’t, a security depending on which lawyer you ask.

That world has changed. The pipes now work. Custody is institutional-grade. Smart contract security has gone from afterthought to standard practice: formal verification, audit protocols, bug bounties that actually catch exploits before they matter. Settlement happens on-chain with finality traditional markets can’t match. Regulation, finally, has enough clarity that serious firms can build businesses instead of hiring compliance teams to debate the SEC.

The thesis has always been simple:If ownership can be represented digitally, with programmability built in, entire layers of intermediation disappear. No transfer agents. No custodian banks pushing paper. No T+2 settlement delays. Just clean, instant, auditable ownership, moving at the speed of information.

But timing is everything. Go too early and you burn capital educating the market while the infrastructure catches up. Now when BlackRock is testing at large scale, major banks have custody in production, public markets are hungry for exposure and investors want to borrow against real assets and the risk/reward dynamic changes completely.

By late 2026, tokenisation won’t be a theme anymore: it will be infrastructure. The question isn’t if but who owns the rails and whether today’s listing platforms capture enough early volume to remain dominant. 

Cantor, true to form, is spreading its bets following John Bogle’s advice: “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Buy the haystack.”Optionality, once again, may prove the smartest trade.