The Public Ledger: Onchain Stocks Arrive

Hello, Fintech Friends!

Last week, Securitize went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ (congrats to the team, if you’re reading this!). It got there through a SPAC merger that valued the company at $1.25 billion.

But what's more interesting is that it also issued its own stock directly onchain. About $295 million of SECZ now trades as tokens, which the company says makes it the largest tokenized stock in the world. No company had ever brought its shares onchain on the day it went public.

But let's take a step back and start with what Securitize does, because most people outside crypto have never heard of it. The company provides the infrastructure that lets other firms turn real-world assets, things like money market funds, stocks, and commodities, into tokens.

When BlackRock wanted to put a fund onchain, it used Securitize. BUIDL, BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, is the largest of its kind, holding around $2.5 billion in assets. Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane, and VanEck use Securitize too. It handles the issuance and keeps the official register of who owns what, holding the same regulated licenses that exist in traditional markets, a transfer agent, a broker-dealer, and an alternative trading system, rebuilt to run on a blockchain.

Only about $33 billion of assets sit onchain today (excl. stablecoins), a rounding error against the $300 trillion of investable assets in the world, and almost all of it is tokenized money market funds. BlackRock's BUIDL is one of the biggest of those funds. Franklin Templeton's BENJI holds about $2 billion, and JPMorgan just launched its own. JLTXX, or the Onchain Liquidity Token Money Market Fund, went live in May and grew about 250% in a month to nearly $700 million.

Citi projects the market reaches $5.5 trillion by 2030, and up to $8.2 trillion if adoption moves faster. BCG is more bullish, with a scenario hitting $22.8 trillion by 2030 and $88 trillion by 2035.

While onchain MMFs are already here, stocks are next. Last week Robinhood launched its own blockchain, Robinhood Chain, and expanded its stock tokens to more than 120 countries, trading around the clock. Coinbase runs Base, its own blockchain, and less than a month ago started offering tokenized stocks outside the US. It is early, and there is no settled structure yet for what a tokenized stock even is, which is probably the reason why both keep these tokens away from US customers.

The incumbents are moving too. The NYSE is building a tokenized securities platform, Nasdaq is pulling tokenization into its own exchange, and the DTCC, which clears almost every US stock trade, is building tokenization services of its own.

Citi estimates that if just 10% of US retail investors move onchain by 2030, that is $2.6 trillion of demand for tokenized equities on its own.

This is a historic period for tokenization. I am sure that one day the data for the charts in this newsletter will come from blockchains, not Yahoo Finance. And the name of this newsletter, The Public Ledger, will start to make a lot more sense.

Jev Kazanins

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Klarna $KLAR ( ▼ 2.42% ) applied to federal and Utah regulators to establish Klarna Bank USA, an FDIC-insured industrial bank. The charter would let it fund loans with customer deposits and bring its US banking in-house, cutting its reliance on the banking partners that today hold its debit cards and the high-yield savings accounts it launched last month. Klarna is no newcomer to banking. It has run a licensed bank out of Sweden since 2017 and already gathers deposits in European markets including Germany and the Netherlands.

Klarna's rivals already took this path. Affirm filed for a Nevada industrial charter in January, and Block runs its consumer lending, including for Afterpay, off Square Financial Services, a Utah industrial bank it has held since 2020. The prize is cheaper funding. Deposits gathered directly cost less and stick around longer than the wholesale financing and partner-bank deals most US fintechs use, and they remove the fees Klarna pays its banking partners on every account.

Read more: Klarna seeks U.S. bank charter in latest push beyond buy now, pay later

SoFi $SOFI ( ▼ 1.16% ) launched SoFi Small Business Loans on June 30, fixed loans from $2,500 to $250,000 for members to buy equipment, stock inventory, or hire staff. There is no application fee, no origination fee, and no prepayment penalty. Members can check eligibility in minutes and, if approved, get funded as soon as 24 hours later. The loans are originated by SoFi Bank, and applicants who do not qualify are routed to third-party lenders in SoFi's loan marketplace.

SoFi is going after the slice of its 14.7 million consumer members who also own or run a business, so their business borrowing stays on the same app as their personal loans, savings, and investments. It is the same playbook SoFi runs elsewhere. It lends directly off its bank charter and deposit funding, refers the rest to partners in its marketplace for a fee, and keeps adding products so a member has less reason to bank anywhere else. SoFi cited survey data that three in four small business owners find it hard to access affordable capital, and that more than half of borrowers pick online lenders for speed. That is the gap it is aiming at, with customers it already has.

Read more: SoFi Introduces Small Business Loans

Block $XYZ ( ▼ 1.63% ) launched integrations with ChatGPT and Claude that let customers find a restaurant, browse its menu, and order without leaving the chat. Eligible US food and beverage sellers are enrolled automatically. Orders route straight into the seller's existing Square point of sale and kitchen display, and Square syncs menus, hours, and stock in real time so an agent never shows a sold-out item. Square charges no marketplace commission, only its standard processing fee of about 2.9% plus $0.30.

Delivery marketplaces like DoorDash and Uber Eats charge restaurants commissions that often run 15% to 30% per order. Square is adding a new ordering channel at its standard processing rate instead, betting that keeping its sellers' orders inside its own system matters more than a per-order cut. It is Square's version of the agentic-commerce push Adyen made last month with its enterprise APIs, aimed instead at the small merchants Square already serves. Square says it will expand to other categories and AI platforms.

Read more: Square Introduces New ChatGPT and Claude Integrations