BlackRock-Backed Securitize (SECZ) Debuts On The NYSE — Here Is Everything Behind The $400 Million IPO

Securitize made its Wall Street debut on Thursday, listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker “SECZ” and becoming one of the latest crypto companies to go public in a busy year for the industry’s IPO pipeline. 

Securitize Is Tokenizing Its Own Stock 

The company raised $400 million through its public offering, which was structured as a merger with Cantor Equity Partners II, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The deal placed Securitize’s total valuation at $1.25 billion. 

The listing also came with another major announcement. Securitize said it plans to tokenize its own stock, issuing both traditional shares that settle through conventional market infrastructure and a tokenized version of the same equity on the blockchain.

In its press release on Wednesday,  the firm noted that the tokenized version of SECZ will initially launch on the Avalanche (AVAX) and Solana (SOL) blockchains. Carlos Domingo, Securitize’s co-founder and CEO, framed the move as more than a company milestone: 

We have long said that public equities are moving onchain, and there is no stronger validation of that belief than tokenizing our own public stock on Day 1.

Brett Redfearn, the company’s president, was equally direct in an interview with Fortune at the stock exchange, stating, “Today is a watershed event in the process of bringing traditional services on-chain.”

The Platform Behind BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund 

Securitize is currently the world’s largest tokenization platform, with more than $4 billion in assets under management (AuM). Tokenization, for context, is the process of taking a traditional financial asset — a stock, a bond, a fund — and representing it as a digital token on a blockchain, making it easier to trade, settle, and manage. 

The platform’s most well-known product is the tokenization of BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, one of the largest tokenized money-market products on-chain. Beyond BlackRock, Securitize’s platform powers tokenized investment products for Apollo, BNY, Hamilton Lane, KKR, and VanEck. 

Back in June, the firm extended its reach further by issuing the Hamilton Lane HLSCOPE private-credit fund on the TRON blockchain — its first multi-chain institutional product outside of Ethereum (ETH).

Shares dipped below their initial public offering price in pre-market trading but recovered to close the day at $12.30 — a 4.4% gain on its first session.

Featured image generated with OpenArt.