Tokenised IPOs: The future of going public?
August 2026
As institutional players move to bring primary equity offerings onchain, tokenised IPOs promise to compress listing timelines and slash underwriting costs. But while the technology promises a future defined by atomic settlement, smart contracts, and monetary savings, the reality is one of muddled regulatory complexity and a market that might not be ready. Matthew Challis explores
Image: versusstudio/stock.adobe.com
An initial public offering (IPO) is one of finance's most extensive undertakings. Compiling a comprehensive business plan, an overview of the firm’s performance, financial model and controls, proceeds distribution, and articulating corporate governance arrangements can take at least six months of hard, non-stop work — not to mention the associated costs. For small and mid-cap companies in particular, this eye-wateringly high time and monetary cost has historically been a prohibitive blockade when trying to go public.
Is it, then, surprising that tokenisation — a technology touted to change the face of financial markets as we know them — in moving from pilot programmes into production, is being utilised for IPOs? Not to Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize, which, on 16 July 2026, combined to enable companies to conduct IPOs and follow-on equity offerings using blockchain-based infrastructure.
The premise of smart contracts, instant trading, and monetary savings is, undoubtedly, an enticing prospect for any institution wishing to go public. But what does that look like, in practice?
The overhaul
As previously mentioned, the long, manual, and expensive nature of an IPO takes any firm of any size a great deal of time. Typically, the pre-offering phase can be a year-long process consisting of manual coordination between legal counsel, underwriters, and regulatory bodies to finalise a prospectus. For small and mid-size firms, this can feel like an insurmountable undertaking. But by utilising automated smart templates, a pre-offering timeline can be shortened to just three months, with combined up-front listing and legal fees cut by almost 80 per cent — from US$379,300 to a mere US$78,500 — according to a case study on the Canadian real estate fund BRED, listed on the Jamaican Stock Exchange.
With the advent of tokenisation, a fundamental shift is taking place within the digital asset ecosystem. Utilising blockchain for recording ownership to improve cap-table management, “improved operational efficiency through decreased settlement time, and increased transparency”, says Chris Brodersen, managing director, blockchain and digital assets, enterprise technology and information at EisnerAmper.
Furthermore, raising blockchain-native tokenised capital and offering embedded ownership rights have the potential to “reduce friction across issuance, settlement, and ongoing administration”, all while “preserving the investor protections that public markets require”, according to Jesse Knutson, head of operations at Bitfinex Securities.
Tokenisation also applies a degree of transparency not before seen from IPOs. Onchain book-building and allocation is inherently transparent and programmable, as opposed to the opaque nature of one negotiated between underwriters and their largest clients.
By moving these processes onto the blockchain, a new globally distributed institutional investor base of digitally-native participants can be unlocked; one that TradFi distribution networks are simply unable to reach.
In March 2026, this streamlined access to international liquidity was demonstrated by digital asset platform Backpack and asset manager Superstate, wherein the firms facilitated onchain allocations of official IPO shares on the Solana blockchain for eligible clients.
And in June 2026, the appetite for onchain exposure was validated further when global tokenised equity surged drastically, up 145 per cent month-on-month to approximately US$3.86 billion, resulting predominantly from the tokenisation of SpaceX shares, which themselves accounted for US$1.19 billion of that monthly total.
It seems, then, that the message for institutional underwriters is clear. Onchain capital raises are, in fact, the real deal, and a rapidly scaling alternative for global capital formation.
Issuer sponsorship vs synthetic wrappers
Much of the tokenised real world asset (RWA) market has been, and still is, dominated by the utilisation of third-party synthetic ‘wrappers’ to represent equity — around 78 per cent, according to a report from crypto asset manager Pantera.
The Cantor-Securtize collaboration is different, though. This is the first instance of major Wall Street players attempting to utilise tokenisation to alter the structure of institutional equity capital markets, and it does so by going completely against the broader market trend. The firms have adopted an ‘issuer-sponsored’ model that integrates tokenisation directly into initial and follow-up offerings.
A third-party wrapper also falls short on the regulatory front. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) maintains that a tokenised security is still subject to TradFi disclosure and registration laws. A third party cannot, inherently, access a company’s internal private financial books and liabilities, and subsequently fails to fulfil the strict legal prospectus of an IPO.
It would seem then that the case for sponsor issuance is abundantly clear. “In that model, the token is the actual security, recorded in the issuer’s books, and on the transfer agent’s official register,” says Ben Boehmke, head of strategy for equities at Cantor Fitzgerald. “The holder has a direct legal claim on the company, sits on the cap table, and keeps full shareholder rights: voting, dividends, and participation in corporate actions.”
But the sponsorship selection is not without nuance. American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), for example, can be drawn upon to illustrate how wrappers could work in an onchain IPO context. A sponsored ADR is formed under an agreement between the issuer and a single depositary bank, whereas an unsponsored programme is established without the issuer’s involvement, and the same company can end up with a plethora of competing programmes, all on different terms. Within such an arrangement, investors must bear the burden of conducting their own structural due diligence to wrap their heads around the wrapper, and understand what they actually own.
Significantly, however, the ADR market was able to work through this dilemma by mandating disclosure and registration, as opposed to shutting anything down entirely.
Standardised documentation, a registration requirement, and issuer disclosure conditions became what Boehmke refers to as a “proven template”, taking a fragmented market and making it investable. That, for Cantor and Securitize, appears to be the most sensible path, he says.
“In the past, issuers and investment banks would look to depository receipts as a means to access global markets; increasingly, we think they will look to tokenisation,” Knutson believes.
But that is not the whole picture. A wrapped token inherently carries risk of bankruptcy and synthetic legal complications that cannot be avoided in their entirety, no matter the robustness of the model. Each wrapped token is a bet on someone else’s custody, and each risk is one that the holder of the underlying security would not face.
Rules and regulations
In May 2026, the SEC planned its ‘Innovation Exemption’, which would have allowed tokenised stocks to trade on crypto-native platforms under much less scrutiny than their TradFi counterparts.
For now, at least, simply tokenising an asset does not absolve it of its regulatory obligations. Navigating the complexities of Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) standards remains a formidable challenge when launching an onchain offering, particularly for an issuer conducting a tokenised IPO.
The speed, or lack thereof, at which regulatory bodies are keeping pace with the shifting digital asset landscape is proving to be one of tokenisation's greatest bottlenecks. “Greater regulatory clarity globally on the treatment of blockchain-native assets is needed to boost issuer and investor confidence in tokenised IPOs, which will in turn help to boost liquidity over time,” Knutson notes.
Indeed, even former SEC official Salman Banaei, testifying in front of the House Financial Services Committee, characterised the proposed ‘Innovation Exemption’ for tokenisation as nothing short of a “stop-gap” solution. Counterproductive in nature and brimming with false comfort, strict volume caps, and uncertain renewals, offering, in real terms, very little to entrepreneurs while starving platforms of the legal durability necessary to attract institutional capital.
Protocol-level compliance is already operational, and, if anything, the case for tokenisation in the context of an IPO becomes even clearer when the current regulatory challenges are broken down. Modern onchain offerings do away with often redundant KYC checks — that require multiple intermediaries to run parallel verification processes that take days at a time — and condense data into a centralised, compliant hub. Once offchain verification is complete, platforms programmatically enforce compliance at the ledger level. By integrating token standards like ERC-3643, which link verified investors to onchain identity contracts (ONCHAINID), smart contracts can automatically prevent transfers to unverified wallets or sanctioned entities.
Rules are natively embedded into the technology, speeding up processes and moving compliance away from the ongoing administrative headaches of yesteryear, and into the automated nature of the 21st century.
The settlement paradox
Insofar as clichés go, the “24/7, instant, programmability, and atomic settlement” capabilities of tokenisation are benefits I am sure you have all heard before. I doubt anybody’s life is changing because a trade is clearing in seconds instead of days.
Having said that, the case for tokenisation’s impact on an IPO is, perhaps, one of the strongest justifications for implementing the technology at scale. Could it have as drastic and transformative an impact anywhere else in the financial world? Take, for instance, the multi-day clearing lag of 5 to 10 days before cash is collected and allotment reports are delivered, where underwriters are exposed to market volatility and default risk. Instead, a tokenised IPO opens the door for that to happen atomically in a matter of minutes.
But, and this is a big but, this inadvertently introduces a problem. If institutional allocators do not have 100 per cent of the cash leg immediately available onchain at the exact millisecond of pricing, the credit buffers and overnight funding windows relied upon as backstops underpinning major offerings are removed from the equation.
This is where the theoretical promise of atomic clearing collides with the operational reality of market-making. “The appeal of atomic settlement is clear. Cash and securities change hands simultaneously or not at all, which removes settlement and counterparty risk almost entirely,” Boehmke explains. This upside, however, can be interpreted in a completely contradictory manner. “For example, what happens to ‘circuit breakers’ intended to allow markets to stabilise in times of stress?” Brodersen asks.
Boehmke views this through a different lens. “Settling every trade individually and instantly changes that arithmetic and shifts liquidity demands into real time,” he says. “That is a solvable problem, and it is the main one to solve.”
And the market has already begun to do so. The ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach, in which securities are moved onchain, followed by an extension of trading hours, before building out stablecoin adoption so a credible cash leg is available round the clock, and atomic delivery-versus-payment needs are therefore satisfied. Finally, atomic settlement can be moved, deliberately, to where it adds the most value, which could be, according to research platform the Intelligence Economy Institute, the real-time collateral orchestration layer; the seams between the systems.
Ultimately, the future of tokenised IPOs hinges on the technology’s ability to prove itself as being tangibly better than TradFi offerings. Rewriting the foundation of what is such a complex and time-consuming undertaking is itself time-consuming and complex. And if the market, regulators, and key institutional players cannot quite agree on what is and is not a positive, is there really much point?
Is it, then, surprising that tokenisation — a technology touted to change the face of financial markets as we know them — in moving from pilot programmes into production, is being utilised for IPOs? Not to Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize, which, on 16 July 2026, combined to enable companies to conduct IPOs and follow-on equity offerings using blockchain-based infrastructure.
The premise of smart contracts, instant trading, and monetary savings is, undoubtedly, an enticing prospect for any institution wishing to go public. But what does that look like, in practice?
The overhaul
As previously mentioned, the long, manual, and expensive nature of an IPO takes any firm of any size a great deal of time. Typically, the pre-offering phase can be a year-long process consisting of manual coordination between legal counsel, underwriters, and regulatory bodies to finalise a prospectus. For small and mid-size firms, this can feel like an insurmountable undertaking. But by utilising automated smart templates, a pre-offering timeline can be shortened to just three months, with combined up-front listing and legal fees cut by almost 80 per cent — from US$379,300 to a mere US$78,500 — according to a case study on the Canadian real estate fund BRED, listed on the Jamaican Stock Exchange.
With the advent of tokenisation, a fundamental shift is taking place within the digital asset ecosystem. Utilising blockchain for recording ownership to improve cap-table management, “improved operational efficiency through decreased settlement time, and increased transparency”, says Chris Brodersen, managing director, blockchain and digital assets, enterprise technology and information at EisnerAmper.
Furthermore, raising blockchain-native tokenised capital and offering embedded ownership rights have the potential to “reduce friction across issuance, settlement, and ongoing administration”, all while “preserving the investor protections that public markets require”, according to Jesse Knutson, head of operations at Bitfinex Securities.
Tokenisation also applies a degree of transparency not before seen from IPOs. Onchain book-building and allocation is inherently transparent and programmable, as opposed to the opaque nature of one negotiated between underwriters and their largest clients.
By moving these processes onto the blockchain, a new globally distributed institutional investor base of digitally-native participants can be unlocked; one that TradFi distribution networks are simply unable to reach.
In March 2026, this streamlined access to international liquidity was demonstrated by digital asset platform Backpack and asset manager Superstate, wherein the firms facilitated onchain allocations of official IPO shares on the Solana blockchain for eligible clients.
And in June 2026, the appetite for onchain exposure was validated further when global tokenised equity surged drastically, up 145 per cent month-on-month to approximately US$3.86 billion, resulting predominantly from the tokenisation of SpaceX shares, which themselves accounted for US$1.19 billion of that monthly total.
It seems, then, that the message for institutional underwriters is clear. Onchain capital raises are, in fact, the real deal, and a rapidly scaling alternative for global capital formation.
Issuer sponsorship vs synthetic wrappers
Much of the tokenised real world asset (RWA) market has been, and still is, dominated by the utilisation of third-party synthetic ‘wrappers’ to represent equity — around 78 per cent, according to a report from crypto asset manager Pantera.
The Cantor-Securtize collaboration is different, though. This is the first instance of major Wall Street players attempting to utilise tokenisation to alter the structure of institutional equity capital markets, and it does so by going completely against the broader market trend. The firms have adopted an ‘issuer-sponsored’ model that integrates tokenisation directly into initial and follow-up offerings.
A third-party wrapper also falls short on the regulatory front. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) maintains that a tokenised security is still subject to TradFi disclosure and registration laws. A third party cannot, inherently, access a company’s internal private financial books and liabilities, and subsequently fails to fulfil the strict legal prospectus of an IPO.
It would seem then that the case for sponsor issuance is abundantly clear. “In that model, the token is the actual security, recorded in the issuer’s books, and on the transfer agent’s official register,” says Ben Boehmke, head of strategy for equities at Cantor Fitzgerald. “The holder has a direct legal claim on the company, sits on the cap table, and keeps full shareholder rights: voting, dividends, and participation in corporate actions.”
But the sponsorship selection is not without nuance. American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), for example, can be drawn upon to illustrate how wrappers could work in an onchain IPO context. A sponsored ADR is formed under an agreement between the issuer and a single depositary bank, whereas an unsponsored programme is established without the issuer’s involvement, and the same company can end up with a plethora of competing programmes, all on different terms. Within such an arrangement, investors must bear the burden of conducting their own structural due diligence to wrap their heads around the wrapper, and understand what they actually own.
Significantly, however, the ADR market was able to work through this dilemma by mandating disclosure and registration, as opposed to shutting anything down entirely.
Standardised documentation, a registration requirement, and issuer disclosure conditions became what Boehmke refers to as a “proven template”, taking a fragmented market and making it investable. That, for Cantor and Securitize, appears to be the most sensible path, he says.
“In the past, issuers and investment banks would look to depository receipts as a means to access global markets; increasingly, we think they will look to tokenisation,” Knutson believes.
But that is not the whole picture. A wrapped token inherently carries risk of bankruptcy and synthetic legal complications that cannot be avoided in their entirety, no matter the robustness of the model. Each wrapped token is a bet on someone else’s custody, and each risk is one that the holder of the underlying security would not face.
Rules and regulations
In May 2026, the SEC planned its ‘Innovation Exemption’, which would have allowed tokenised stocks to trade on crypto-native platforms under much less scrutiny than their TradFi counterparts.
For now, at least, simply tokenising an asset does not absolve it of its regulatory obligations. Navigating the complexities of Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) standards remains a formidable challenge when launching an onchain offering, particularly for an issuer conducting a tokenised IPO.
The speed, or lack thereof, at which regulatory bodies are keeping pace with the shifting digital asset landscape is proving to be one of tokenisation's greatest bottlenecks. “Greater regulatory clarity globally on the treatment of blockchain-native assets is needed to boost issuer and investor confidence in tokenised IPOs, which will in turn help to boost liquidity over time,” Knutson notes.
Indeed, even former SEC official Salman Banaei, testifying in front of the House Financial Services Committee, characterised the proposed ‘Innovation Exemption’ for tokenisation as nothing short of a “stop-gap” solution. Counterproductive in nature and brimming with false comfort, strict volume caps, and uncertain renewals, offering, in real terms, very little to entrepreneurs while starving platforms of the legal durability necessary to attract institutional capital.
Protocol-level compliance is already operational, and, if anything, the case for tokenisation in the context of an IPO becomes even clearer when the current regulatory challenges are broken down. Modern onchain offerings do away with often redundant KYC checks — that require multiple intermediaries to run parallel verification processes that take days at a time — and condense data into a centralised, compliant hub. Once offchain verification is complete, platforms programmatically enforce compliance at the ledger level. By integrating token standards like ERC-3643, which link verified investors to onchain identity contracts (ONCHAINID), smart contracts can automatically prevent transfers to unverified wallets or sanctioned entities.
Rules are natively embedded into the technology, speeding up processes and moving compliance away from the ongoing administrative headaches of yesteryear, and into the automated nature of the 21st century.
The settlement paradox
Insofar as clichés go, the “24/7, instant, programmability, and atomic settlement” capabilities of tokenisation are benefits I am sure you have all heard before. I doubt anybody’s life is changing because a trade is clearing in seconds instead of days.
Having said that, the case for tokenisation’s impact on an IPO is, perhaps, one of the strongest justifications for implementing the technology at scale. Could it have as drastic and transformative an impact anywhere else in the financial world? Take, for instance, the multi-day clearing lag of 5 to 10 days before cash is collected and allotment reports are delivered, where underwriters are exposed to market volatility and default risk. Instead, a tokenised IPO opens the door for that to happen atomically in a matter of minutes.
But, and this is a big but, this inadvertently introduces a problem. If institutional allocators do not have 100 per cent of the cash leg immediately available onchain at the exact millisecond of pricing, the credit buffers and overnight funding windows relied upon as backstops underpinning major offerings are removed from the equation.
This is where the theoretical promise of atomic clearing collides with the operational reality of market-making. “The appeal of atomic settlement is clear. Cash and securities change hands simultaneously or not at all, which removes settlement and counterparty risk almost entirely,” Boehmke explains. This upside, however, can be interpreted in a completely contradictory manner. “For example, what happens to ‘circuit breakers’ intended to allow markets to stabilise in times of stress?” Brodersen asks.
Boehmke views this through a different lens. “Settling every trade individually and instantly changes that arithmetic and shifts liquidity demands into real time,” he says. “That is a solvable problem, and it is the main one to solve.”
And the market has already begun to do so. The ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach, in which securities are moved onchain, followed by an extension of trading hours, before building out stablecoin adoption so a credible cash leg is available round the clock, and atomic delivery-versus-payment needs are therefore satisfied. Finally, atomic settlement can be moved, deliberately, to where it adds the most value, which could be, according to research platform the Intelligence Economy Institute, the real-time collateral orchestration layer; the seams between the systems.
Ultimately, the future of tokenised IPOs hinges on the technology’s ability to prove itself as being tangibly better than TradFi offerings. Rewriting the foundation of what is such a complex and time-consuming undertaking is itself time-consuming and complex. And if the market, regulators, and key institutional players cannot quite agree on what is and is not a positive, is there really much point?
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