Eight years after co-founding Securitize in 2017, Carlos Domingo is taking the helm at the company, which has quietly become one of the core infrastructure players for tokenized asset trading.
This feature is part of CoinDesk The Most Influential List of 2025.
The company said it had approximately $3.6 billion in tokenized real-world assets (RWA) outstanding as of the end of November and expects assets under management to exceed $4 billion this year. Securitize is already profitable – revenue has grown about 10 times in the past 18 months – and is preparing to go public via a SPAC merger with Cantor Fitzgerald’s company, aiming to go public early next year.
“This has been the best year in the history of the company so far,” Domingo said in an interview with CoinDesk. “This is the inflection point we’ve been waiting for.”
Tokenization before it becomes cool
If tokenization is one of the big topics in crypto right now, Domingo is quick to point out that Securitize once existed, but in fact it didn’t.
“In 2021, I’ll be talking to investors and they’ll be saying, ‘Why are we investing in tokenization? Look at FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, they’re growing so fast,'” he said. “I’d say, ‘Sure, but are you sure those people will be there tomorrow?’ There were a lot of red flags. Still, we weren’t the cool kids on the block.”
This is a challenging path. Securitize has to raise new money about every 18 months, in smaller rounds compared to the huge rounds that go to unregulated trading platforms.
Hiring talent has also become more difficult. “We can’t give people big token packages. We can’t pay top wages,” Domingo said.
What keeps him going is faith and a bit of existential philosophy.
“One of our board members, Brad Stephens from Blockchain Capital, told me: You need to be like a cockroach,” Domingo said. “Digitalization in any industry is inevitable, the only thing you don’t know is when. So you need to make sure you don’t die before it happens.”
He has been outspoken about what happened to early tokenization competitors. “If you look at the companies that looked like they were on the verge of dominance, most have disappeared, run out of money or sold on poor terms,” he said. “Getting there early becomes a problem if you can’t survive.”
Carlos Domingo to speak at upcoming CoinDesk conference Consensus Hong Kong February and 2026 Consensus In Miami in May.
From technology supplier to one-stop shop
When Securitize launched, Domingo thought he was building a software company.
“The original idea was to sell the tokenized platform as technology,” he recalls. Banks, asset managers and other issuers will license the stack, tokenize their assets and handle everything themselves. Securitization only releases code.
Less than a year later, reality set in. “In 2018, it became clear that we needed to move from being a technology provider to being a service provider,” he said. “People who own financial assets are not tech companies. They want someone to serve them — that’s what Bank of New York, State Street or SS&C do.”
This prompted Securitize to pursue licenses and roles that were embedded in traditional financial pipelines. The company became a U.S. registered transfer agent and subsequently added broker-dealer, alternative trading systems (ATS), investment advisory and fund management capabilities. This transformation culminated in the acquisition of a division of MG Stover, making Securitize the largest digital asset fund manager.
Now, instead of selling tokenization toolkits, Domingo is launching a one-stop service to bring assets on-chain.
“We go to asset managers and say: we will form funds, we will put your securities on-chain, we will integrate with blockchain and DeFi, we will do distribution, fund management, everything,” he said. “You do what you do best — manage assets. We do the other things.”
He traces the strategy to a dog-eared copy of “Crossing the Chasm,” Jeffrey Moore’s classic about commercializing new technologies. Key idea: Early adopters are happy to stitch together multiple vendors; the mainstream market is not.
“To cross the chasm, you have to offer the entire product,” Domingo said. “People are not going to build things piecemeal by putting five different providers together.”
BlackRock, Binance and the Collateral Phase
The company is now well beyond survival, garnering a strong list of backers including BlackRock, Jump Crypto, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest. Securitize helped bring BlackRock’s tokenized fund to market last year and has since expanded it to multiple blockchains, including Solana and BNB Chain. It is currently the largest tokenized issuance of U.S. Treasury bonds, with a market capitalization of approximately $2.5 billion. It also has strong backers Ark Invest, BlackRock and Jump Crypto.
Domingo said the important shift is not just about putting securities on a “better ledger,” but what happens afterward. The use cases he highlights are incidental.
“We are very bullish on collateral,” he said. “You get high-quality collateral like what people use in TradFi, but move it at cryptocurrency speeds (24/7) and with the collateral quality that institutions expect.”
Securitize partners with venues like Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, to use tokenized RWA as collateral for derivatives and other products. This pipeline is not popular on social media, but Domingo believes tokenization is starting to have an impact on the broader crypto market structure.
Going to the open market
The SPAC listing is both a milestone and a new pressure.
“I’m very excited to finally go public. This will be a defining moment for us,” he said. “It’s also scary. I’ve never been the CEO of a public company.”
While Securitize’s year may have looked like an overnight success, from Domingo’s perspective, it was the delayed rewards of acting early and refusing to leave.
“The question now is not whether this is happening in the industry,” he said. “It’s about how much market share can we capture and retain. We’ve been talking about this for eight years. Finally, everyone else is talking about it too.”
