Securitize started trading on the New York Stock Exchange on July 2 under the ticker SECZ, and it is putting part of its own stock on blockchain rails too.
The company that runs BlackRock's BUIDL fund is now a public company itself. Securitize completed its merger with Cantor Equity Partners II, a SPAC backed by Cantor Fitzgerald, raising roughly $400 million in gross proceeds including PIPE financing, according to a report from The Block. The deal values the combined company at a $1.25 billion pre-money equity valuation, and Benchmark has already initiated coverage with a Buy rating and a $16 price target.
You don't see many SPAC deals hold together like this one did. Fewer than 30% of Cantor Equity Partners II's Class A shareholders chose to redeem their shares before the vote, according to Yahoo Finance, meaning Securitize kept more than 71% of the SPAC's trust. That's low by recent SPAC standards, where redemption rates of 80% or 90% have become routine as investors cash out rather than ride along with a merger. Wall Street, in this case, decided to stay in.
Carlos Domingo, Securitize's co-founder and CEO, has been building toward this moment for eight years. "When we started more than eight years ago, the idea that major institutions would embrace tokenized securities was still largely theoretical," he said in a statement carried by PRNewswire. "Today, tokenization is moving into the mainstream, and we believe becoming a public company gives us the visibility, credibility, and capital to lead that next phase of growth."
Securitize's backers read like a shortlist of firms that have spent the last few years deciding tokenization is worth a real bet: BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Coinbase and Circle. BlackRock is the client that matters most. BUIDL, its tokenized money market fund, runs on Securitize's platform across multiple blockchain networks and has grown to roughly $3 billion in assets. It pays income to token holders and can settle faster than the multi-day cycle that still governs most of Wall Street.
That mismatch, faster settlement for one fund and slower plumbing for almost everything else, is the whole reason Securitize exists as a business.
The stranger part of the July 2 debut is what Securitize did with its own stock. The company listed SECZ shares on the NYSE through the standard settlement rails, and at the same time launched issuer-sponsored tokenized versions of those shares for eligible U.S. investors on Avalanche and Solana, according to company announcements carried by PRNewswire and StockTitan. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Securitize's tokenized market cap on Avalanche would be more than $300 million at launch, making it the largest tokenized stock, while 15% of its recent average trading volume would be made available on Solana.
A share bought through a traditional brokerage still settles the old way. A tokenized share is supposed to move and settle much faster, any day of the week. That is the pitch. Now Securitize has to prove it with its own name on the stock certificate.
Nobody else has made this kind of day-one public test the center of a listed equity debut. Securitize isn't asking a client to take the reputational risk first. It's putting SECZ through the same kind of infrastructure it sells to BlackRock and pitches to the rest of institutional finance, with regulators, traders and short sellers all watching.
Frankly, that's the real test here, not the $400 million raise or the $16 price target. Plenty of tokenization pitches have promised instant settlement and 24/7 markets without putting enough real capital behind the claim. Securitize is now on the hook to show whether the mechanics work when the asset is its own public stock, not a private pilot tucked away in a deck.
If tokenized SECZ shares trade cleanly alongside the NYSE-listed stock, every bank that has spent the past two years running tokenization pilots gets a live reference point to point to internally. If the mechanics are clunky, or liquidity between the two versions splits in ways that confuse pricing, the skeptics who think tokenization is still mostly a narrative will have a public example to cite instead of a hypothetical. Either way, the answer won't stay theoretical much longer.
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