Securitize

The recent debate around tokenized stocks keeps coming back to the same supposed trade-off: compliance versus composability. The argument goes something like this: if we want securities to really live onchain, move between wallets, plug into DeFi and become programmable financial assets, they need to be permissionless. Anything else is just TradFi on a blockchain. I think that framing is wrong. Carlos here writes about one side of this debate and the problems with some of the stock-token structures being launched today. I want to focus on the other side: permissioned does not mean closed, and it does not mean giving up the advantages of tokenization. At Securitize we made a deliberate choice. Put the security on public blockchains. Let investors self-custody it. Let it interact with smart contracts and DeFi. But keep the rules that make it a regulated security attached to the asset. Identity and eligibility can be verified. Transfer restrictions can be enforced. Sanctions controls don’t disappear after the first purchase. Dividends, voting and other corporate actions can still reach the right holder. And the asset is still onchain. It can be held in a wallet. It can move between eligible investors. It can be used as collateral. It can participate in lending markets and liquidity pools. It can interact with applications built by third parties. We already have Securitize-issued assets integrated across @Aave, @eulerfinance, @Loopscale, @Zharta and more DeFi protocols are coming soon. That’s not theoretical composability. It’s regulated assets being used in DeFi today. The difference is that compliance is part of the asset’s programmability rather than something we pretend disappears once the asset reaches a blockchain. That distinction is important in the current stock-token debate. Robinhood, for example, explicitly presents its Stock Tokens as standard ERC-20s that can be composed into trading, lending and other applications. They are designed to work with existing wallets and tooling without special integration. That is certainly easier. But ease of integration isn’t the same thing as proving that regulated securities need to be permissionless to be composable. The technology gives us another option. Put the security onchain. Put the rules onchain too. Then protocols don’t need to become transfer agents or rebuild securities compliance themselves. They interact with an asset whose transfer rules are already enforceable. Is that harder than deploying a vanilla ERC-20? Absolutely. You have to solve what happens when a security enters a smart contract. How eligibility works through pools and vaults. How collateral can be liquidated. How transfers remain compliant without turning every integration into a walled garden. We’ve spent years working through those problems precisely because we don’t think the answer is choosing between blockchain and investor protection. The objective of tokenization isn’t to remove every rule from capital markets. It’s to remove unnecessary friction and intermediation while preserving the protections that exist for a reason. Public blockchains give us self-custody, programmability, interoperability, composability and a common settlement infrastructure. We shouldn’t have to give those up for regulated securities. And investors shouldn’t have to give up their protections to get them. The harder path is making the two work together. That’s the path we’ve chosen. Because it’s hard.