🚀 Securitize to IPO, S&P's New Index, Staking ETFs, and More

Summary and Key Takeaways

1. Securitize Secures ~$10M from ARK Invest, Rumored to IPO via SPAC

Securitize had quite the week, starting with an investment from the ARK Venture Fund valued at around $10M and representing the fund’s 8th largest allocation. This places Carlos Domingo and his team alongside giants like xAI and Anthropic but vice versa has Cathie Wood’s ARK rubbing shoulders with BlackRock and Morgan Stanley on the Securitize cap table. No doubt we’ll likely see a tokenized ARK Fund (maybe specifically the Venture Fund) as a result of this. However, the week came to an even more exciting close on Friday thanks to the Bloomberg-reported news that Securitize might IPO through a Cantor Fitzgerald blank-check company. The Cantor Equity Partners II SPAC merger would reportedly make Securitize a unicorn, raising its valuation to $1B. Cathie Wood took a $150M allocation from Circle’s IPO and then eventually took profits, showing further confidence in the possibility of Securitize actually IPOing with Brandon Lutnick. We won’t jinx it with early congratulations but wow is this an exciting time for the tokenization industry as a whole!

2. Stripe’s Open Issuance Goes Live for Custom Stablecoins

Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge for $1.1B is about to start paying off now that the service has been integrated with their other acquisition, Privy, to create Open Issuance. This is a GENIUS-compliant Stablecoin-as-a-Service platform, making it quick and easy for smaller businesses to customize their stables for their unique customers and use cases. They’re starting with a couple name-brand examples such as Phantom wallet’s CASH and Native Markets using Bridge for Hyperliquid’s USDH. What does this mean for other businesses? They’ll be able to create their own tickers and experiences in just days, with a built in shared liquidity pool, wallets and cards that support them, customizable cash to treasuries allocations, choice in chains to support, and other features (minus the few defaults needed for stablecoin compliance). Looking at what backs these stables, it’s great to see some top tier options (BlackRock & Fidelity) mixed with a fintech such as Superstate. It’s unclear if these mean the tokenized options BUIDL, FDIT, and USTB although presumably they are. Aside from reserve allocations, businesses can choose the economics such as fees and get to keep more of the yield generated from the treasuries vs. using a 3rd party’s stablecoin like USDT.

With Stripe now offering the rails to issue stablecoins, linked cards, and planning their own Tempo blockchain, you can see the direction this is going in. Stripe is likely going after the Mastercards and Visas of the world as owning the rails means the historically famous 2.9% + $0.30 fee merchants pay for accepting card payments could be brought down to say 1% or even nothing if Stripe wanted to - further incentivizing additional adoption of Open Issuance.

3. S&P Announces New Index, To Be Issued on Dinari: S&P Digital Markets 50 Index

While it was cool to see S&P Dow Jones Indices licensing The 500 to Centrifuge and and Anemoy to create the Janus Henderson Anemoy S&P 500® Fund (SPXA), this was also a signal of more to come and this past week we saw it. S&P DJI is now creating a new index called the S&P Digital Markets 50 meant to blend both cryptos and crypto-company stocks for a diversified portfolio. Who’s issuing this one? Dinari! Dinari is an SEC-registered transfer agent that tokenizes stocks here in the US, making it a prime candidate to issue the token tracking this new index sitting in between public and crypto markets. This index comes just weeks after Bitwise announced their stablecoin & tokenization infrastructure fund expected to come around Thanksgiving, showing the increasing appetite for exposure to digital assets and it makes sense to start with those building the rails of future capital markets. The S&P Digital Markets 50 will combine 15 cryptos and 35 blockchain stocks and Dinari will issue the dShare to track them all. 

Like the Centrifuge collaboration, this is a great step forward but also just the tip of the iceberg. What will this evolve to? Even more complex indices tracking themes and including other asset classes as private market assets continue to come onchain. Aside from the benchmark, the future of them will be a “token of tokens” where it’s extremely easy to rebalance and take more active strategies. This will only intensify as the plumbing for public stocks and private assets bring both natively onchain, opening the door to a whole lot more possible combinations.

4. Ondo Completes Oasis Pro Acquisition

Tokenized stocks have been a big theme this year, from Vlad Tenev of Robinhood getting the masses talking about it and questioning structures to seeing more native public stock tokenization (Superstate and Securitize). Ondo launched Ondo Global Markets for non-U.S. investors to get access to public shares while merging in TradFi liquidity making it one of the premier destinations. However the issue that Herwig has pointed out countless times is that of U.S. investors not having the same access onchain to our own capital markets. That might come to an end soon with the completion of the Oasis Pro acquisition. Through Oasis Pro Markets, Ondo now has transfer agent, broker dealer, and ATS licenses putting them in a great position to take off that IP address blocker and let American investors in on the fun. Of course this is all pending integrations to make it all work but another interesting thing to look at is the types of assets Oasis Pro will allow Ondo to list beyond traditional NMS securities including “tokenized or traditional OTC equities, corporate debt, closed-end mutual funds, REITs, structured products, MBS, ABS, and privately placed securities.” With all of these new assets able to be tokenized and listed on the venue, imagine the custom portfolios and indices providers could offer (as mentioned at the end of section 1) - a race Dinari is currently winning with their new S&P Digital Markets 50 index dShares to come. 

Long term we can expect wealth management firms to integrate more and start offering new model portfolios that they can hyper-customize to their clients’ needs especially as different assets become easier to include. Will they integrate with Ondo, Dinari, Centrifuge, or someone completely new building in stealth? For context, Morgan Stanley is barely allowing crypto allocations to rise to 4% and will make crypto trading available in early 2026 via a zerohash integration so we have a bit of work to go.

5. Crypto ETFs Add Staking in the US: Grayscale, Bitwise, 21Shares

Staking is here! Taking a quick trip down memory lane, January 10, 2024 had the industry ecstatic as the SEC approved the first U.S.-listed crypto spot ETPs (11 of them all at once) - an effort largely led by Grayscale. We’ve seen a variety of new single-asset listings and applications since those BTC ones including spot ETH, SOL, XRP, and LINK followed by multi-asset products as well. With the recent streamlined listing guidelines announcement from the SEC, the spot crypto ETPs will flood in, creating a new opportunity to evolve and that’s staking. Once again leading the charge, Grayscale is the first to offer staking to their existing ETH ETPs (ETHE and ETHE), with GSOL expected to uplist soon. This was quickly followed by Bitwise and 21Shares for their Solana and Ethereum counterparts. 

The fact that returns will be enhanced from staking rewards is already exciting, however the more interesting part to look at is the new version of the “fee war” we saw with the bitcoin ETFs. Rather than fighting over management fees again, Bitwise decided to go straight to 0.20% and focus on the new fight - the staking fee. This is the amount of the generated rewards the fund manager will take, but what makes it even harder to compare them to each other is if the staking provider’s fee is also included in that or not. Jason had a chance to meet Eric Balchunas in person a few months ago and the Bloomberg senior ETF analyst didn't disappoint. An example Eric shares on X is Canary’s 0.50% fee but no cut of rewards (not sure on provider’s fees) compared to Bitwise’s lower 0.20% fee and 6% of the rewards which does include the staking agent’s fee just as 21Shares’ larger 25% of rewards. What do you think is the right combo?

This is not financial advice.

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO Updates

The RWA Foundation introduced the RWA Pod as “A permissionless way for anyone to support RWAs using crypto with multiple RWA project tokens as yield.”

In partnership with PERQ, the RWA Pod allows you to deposit ETH, USDC, ARB, and S/ Sonic. Participants will receive tokens on multiple blockchain protocols related to RWA projects that the RWA Foundation has qualified and selected as Founding Members.

What’s the update this week? What’s the RWA Pod TVL? Hear directly from your RWA Pod Host Ray Buckton! 👇

Interested in watching the interviews with Rex from DRVN Will from Jade City? They’re now available on X and on YouTube, go ahead and check them out 👇!

STM.co Data

This is not financial advice.

Think Like Herwig

Hello readers,

With the new landscape forming for tokenization to go mainstream in the US, there is once again a frenzy for new licenses of.. transfer agents?! I remember it clearly back in 2019 when Securitize registered theirs, marking the first time a tech company (let alone a blockchain company) had applied for one. Seemingly almost the next day, Vertalo announced they had one too. As it turns out, it’s relatively easy to apply for and get a transfer agent license and the total number of companies applying for them was next to none due to existing market incumbents owning the pie. In reality, transfer agents were rarely used by private companies and are a requirement for public companies and for certain exemptions and rules under certain conditions. 

Now blockchain offers the opportunity to flip this service on its head. You might already be wondering, doesn’t blockchain solve for the need of an intermediary to manage a cap table or even execute distributions? And you are correct, the only reason you need the license is so that you can offer companies who legally need this service. Expect all tokenization engines that want to support publicly registered companies in the US to get one and it’s a mark of the industry maturing to once again see an uptick in this number of new licenses. This tells us we can expect more public equities tokenization action this year and heavily next year.

Happy tokenizing, 
Herwig “Happy” Konings
CEO, Security Token Group 

Follow me on X / LinkedIn

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Reports

RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook

Check out a report we contributed to: RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook. Led by Brickken, this report brings multiple parties together in diving into tokenization, with STM.co supporting with both data and some of the written sections.

What’s Inside?

✅ A Breakdown of Tokenization and Related Benefits
✅ Key advantages for issuers, investors, and institutions
✅ How the market is evolving and trends shaping adoption in 2025
✅ What’s next? Expert insights on regulation, DeFi integration, institutional involvement, and market growth

STM’s RWA Market Prediction for 2030

STM.co is proud to release a thorough report on our prediction on the tokenized real world asset market growth. This report explores the variety of opportunities within each asset class to capture value on-chain.

Tokenization can be applied to just about any object and asset type. Art, carbon credits, life insurance, and other sub $5 trillion asset classes weren’t even considered in estimates.

In order for STM to derive its 2030 market predictions, the following asset classes were evaluated: currency, M2/M3, real estate, commodities, public equities, private companies and funds, bonds, credit and lending markets.

This is not financial or investment advice.

Helpful Resources

• $30 Trillion by 2030 - STM

• Global Tokenized Real Estate Market Guide 2024 - STM

• TokenizeThis 2024: Highlights and Key Takeaways - STM

• TokenizeThis 2023: Highlights and Key Takeaways - STM

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q4 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q3 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q2 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q1 Extended - STA

• Real-World Asset Tokenization 2023 According to STM - STM

• Tokenizing an Asset in 3 Easy Steps - Security Token Show

• Rich Data in Private Assets - STM

• State of Security Tokens 2022 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Institutional Edition - STA

• Tokenization for Institutions - What You Need to Know - STM, Arca (YouTube)