Tokenizing Equities: SECZ COO on Adding Stocks to Blockchain, ARK Partnership

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Joining me for this, Billy Miller, COO, Securitize. Securitize stocks launched last week. Tell us a little bit about how this works at this time as we have the tokenization.

Billy Miller (0:13)

Thank you for having me, great to see you. So we launched Securitize stocks on Solana, where we're bringing some of the world's most popular companies onto the blockchain. This is Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla.

The difference maker here is these are not price exposure tracking tokens, trading offshore. These are actually one-to-one backed, real securities held in entitlement on behalf of the end consumers. And we're really doing this to take this first step to actually bring onshore equity trading onto the blockchain and enable more and more utility over time, such as around the clock trading. And we were excited to do that with Solana day one.

SPEAKER_1 (0:52)

So a day like today where Apple hits a record high, I don't have it open, but I saw earlier Tesla was gaining. That part doesn't matter as much here.

Billy Miller (1:04)

I mean, it's obviously a good thing. And what using blockchain is about is expanding the reach of these securities. So these are investors that may not traditionally use a standard brokerage account, or they may be used to be transacting onto the blockchain directly. So maybe they're crypto buyers. So opening up traditional high quality US securities to these investors, just giving a new distribution channel and enticing a new type of investor that expects to transact in a more digitally native way.

SPEAKER_1 (1:32)

Do we expect this to happen to more names? You're talking about a handful of names. Should we expect that the entire S&P 500 is going to be part of this tokenization?

Billy Miller (1:45)

I very much hope so. And we've started to see some of the biggest names in the industry jump in. I mean, here at Securitize, we've worked with the biggest and the best brands across multiple asset classes. We've done treasury products with BlackRock. We've done different credit products with Apollo and Newburger and some of the biggest names in the industry have begun diving in. So we expect this adoption of the technology to normalize over time and become more asset agnostic across every name out there. It's just a better ledger. It's a more modernized technology. And then it is a technology that the new wave of investors are more commonly expecting to be used this way. So I mean, selfishly at Securitize, we hope that everybody eventually embraces tokenization.

SPEAKER_1 (2:29)

Yeah. And look, we talk about 24-7 trading. I know here at the New York Stock Exchange now, we've talked about now, you know, having the trading overnight. So our counterparts in Asia have opportunity. Do you expect to trade on the NYSE?

Billy Miller (2:46)

We do. I mean, look, Securitize went public ourselves on NYSE, and we still tokenized our own equity day one, which trades on the blockchain. So you can have both worlds. You can have a traditional equity trading on traditional exchanges, while you also have an on-chain portion of that trading on various blockchain networks. So, you know, what we're seeing now today, especially exchanges and broker dealers and the recent SEC innovation exemption, there's more and more innovative opportunities for securities to trade. And what Securitize does is to bring these in the most compliant, the most backed way to make sure that the token is still the actual share. This is not a derivative or price wrapper, synthetic. This is the actual shares that are trading just in more innovative ways.

SPEAKER_1 (3:32)

I think about, you know, why now? Congratulations is in order, so congratulations. But why now at this point here?

And does, you know, as you said, look, it doesn't, you don't need to have stocks to be at highs, but that helps spread it out and spread the word and spread visuality and all that. Is that the same with what goes on with Bitcoin? As Bitcoin goes higher, that's also good news for you?

Billy Miller (3:57)

It's a little bit of both. I mean, the better that the crypto market does, the more on-chain money is allocated there and starts exploring other products. Historically, the type of products that investors are engaging with on blockchain have generally been subpar. You're usually buying permissionless crypto. You don't really understand what's actually backing these assets.

So Securitize has been at this for nine years.

We've been tokenizing securities on public blockchains for a long time. And so the why now is the entire crypto economy that's built is hungry for high quality assets from large asset managers. Like we just launched a venture product with ARK and bringing a really interesting innovative professionally managed venture product to retail people that are used to buying cryptocurrency is a breath of fresh air and something that they've all expected and will demand over time. So it's really all of this coming together that there's new technology. There's a really proactive SEC in this administration that is pushing innovation that gives issuers and regulated intermediaries and vendors the comfort to start exploring and do this at scale instead of just doing pilot proof of concepts.