Securitize CEO pushes onchain shareholder records over paper proxies

Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo is advocating for companies to communicate with investors digitally, replacing paper forms and mailed proxy votes with blockchain-based shareholder records.

What Domingo is proposing

The core idea is straightforward. Rather than relying on stacked intermediaries to track who owns a company, Securitize wants a blockchain-based register to serve as the definitive record of public company ownership.

That puts the firm’s model in direct contrast with the framework built around the Depository Trust Company, better known as DTC.

The current setup works a bit like a game of telephone. A company issues shares, those shares pass through layers of intermediaries, and by the end of the chain the issuer often can’t tell who is actually holding them. Beneficial ownership, meaning the identity of the person who truly benefits from holding the shares, gets concealed. Sending out communications, paying dividends and running proxy votes all become harder than they need to be.

Securitize’s pitch is that an onchain register cuts through the fog. Issuers would get direct insight into their capitalization tables and a simpler way to reach shareholders.

The company’s status as an SEC-registered transfer agent is central to the argument. Securitize isn’t suggesting a blockchain sit awkwardly alongside the existing plumbing. It is proposing that the blockchain become the ledger of record itself, framed as working within existing legal rights and regulatory frameworks. Shareholders keep what they already have; the record-keeping is what changes.

Securitize ran the experiment on itself

Securitize listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ on July 2, 2026. Alongside the listing, it tokenized approximately $295 million of its common stock on the Solana and Avalanche blockchains, making it the largest equity event of its kind to date.

In April 2026, Securitize partnered with Computershare to let US issuers create Issuer-Sponsored Tokens, or ISTs. The defining feature of ISTs is that shareholders retain their full rights, including dividends and voting, with ownership recorded on the onchain ledger.

Securitize currently oversees between $4 and $5 billion in tokenized assets. Compliance is built into the design: Know Your Customer checks and whitelisting are mandatory for every participant, so only verified parties can trade.

The shift toward issuer-led tokenization

Securitize’s approach sits within a broader movement in asset tokenization that favors issuer-led structures, where the company itself sanctions the tokenized version of its shares. That diverges from unsanctioned approaches, where the issuer isn’t the one driving the process. When the company is the one sponsoring the token and the transfer agent is keeping the onchain record, the chain of ownership is meant to be unambiguous.

What this means for issuers, investors and crypto

For public companies, a clear, real-time view of the cap table could make shareholder communication, dividend disbursements and proxy voting less of an administrative slog.

For investors, under the IST model, dividends and voting rights stay intact, and the holder’s position lives on a ledger the issuer can actually see.

The mandatory KYC and whitelisting requirements mean these tokens won’t behave like freely circulating crypto assets. Key things to watch include how many US issuers take up the Computershare partnership to launch ISTs, and how SECZ’s own tokenized shares perform as a live example of onchain dividends and voting.