Securitize stock jumped because the SEC decided tokenized equities can now trade on certain platforms. Stocks. On a blockchain. The same stocks you can already buy by opening literally any brokerage app on your phone.
Someone at Securitize spent years lobbying for permission to put Microsoft shares on a distributed ledger so retail traders can pay gas fees on top of their trading commissions. Revolutionary stuff. Takes three days to settle a stock trade the old way. Now you can settle instantly while waiting twelve minutes for network confirmation and praying Ethereum doesn't clog during a busy week.
The pitch goes like this: fractional ownership, 24/7 trading, programmable securities. You know what else offers fractional ownership? Robinhood. For free. At any hour some exchange somewhere is open. And programmable just means adding smart contract risk to equity risk because two catastrophic failure modes are better than one.
Every crypto true believer sees this headline and thinks mass adoption finally arrived. They've been waiting for TradFi to validate their bags since 2017. Now the validation is here and it's the financial equivalent of getting a participation trophy at a track meet you didn't enter.
Securitize went up Thursday. Cool. Check back in six months when trading volume on tokenized stocks is twelve guys in Singapore and one sehr confused Redditor who thought he was buying actual Bitcoin. The SEC greenlighted a solution in search of a problem.
Somewhere a venture capitalist just added "regulatory moat" to a pitch deck next to a slide about democratizing access to assets people already have complete access to.
You wanted stocks on a blockchain and you got them, which means you f*cked up twice: once wanting it and once getting it.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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