Author: Prathik Source: thetokendispatch Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

A company that wants to raise $200 million can start a commercial paper program or use its medium-term note (MTN) shelf issuance line. Commercial paper uses revolving issuance tools to quickly meet short-term funding needs; the medium-term note model is for companies to complete "storage registration" with the regulator at one time, and then sell bonds in batches when the market conditions are suitable. But if the same company wanted to raise $200 million by issuing additional shares, it would have to hire an investment bank, spend weeks visiting funds, and fund up to 7% of the total amount raised to cover the cost of the entire issuance process.

This is a long-standing problem in the field of corporate finance: debt financing has long been normalized, but equity financing requires a set of cumbersome processes.

What causes this asymmetrical pattern is not just paperwork and regulatory rules, the bigger crux lies in the demand for funds. The stocks of listed companies are traded in a single trading pool of the exchange during limited trading hours. When a company's issuance of new shares exceeds the capacity of the secondary market, investment banks or asset management institutions must go through road shows to find new buyers.

Blockchain is expected to break this imbalance and broaden the geographical source boundaries of new stock capital needs.

This article explores how tokenized infrastructure can give equity financing the flexibility of debt financing, and who will capture the value in this transformation.

Eliminate the cumbersome process of equity financing

IPO requires road shows, and investment bank commissions account for 5%-7% of the financing scale. The threshold for additional financing (subsequent equity issuance) has been lowered over the past few decades. In 1982, the U.S. SEC issued Regulation 415 and launched the Shelf Registration System: Qualified companies can register the securities they plan to issue in the next two years at once and then sell them in batches.

ATM Market Issuance Mechanism (At-the-Market) takes this a step further. Enterprises allocate new shares to designated broker-dealers, and the brokers place small amounts and continuously in the secondary market to avoid concentrated supply that affects stock prices. Many times, the market will not notice the additional issuance until the company discloses its quarterly report. The commission for an ATM offering is only 1%-3% of the amount raised, and the cost is about half that of an IPO.

But the ATM model still has shortcomings: if a broker puts too many stocks into an order book that is not deep enough, it will directly cause the stock price to fall. Therefore, this method is only suitable for small-amount financing. If large-scale fundraising is needed, companies still choose traditional road shows. Companies pay IPO rates to cooperative investment banks, essentially buying the investment banks' ability to find buyers for new shares.

Blockchain is expected to solve this pain point.

Expand funding channels

Last week, Cantor Fitzgerald reached a partnership with Securitize to help companies issue stocks directly on the blockchain. This solution is fundamentally different from other on-chain tokenized stocks on the market. Vaidik and I have previously written articles analyzing the ownership models of various tokenized stocks: many tokenized targets are just income-packaging certificates, with only price exposure and no voting rights or complete shareholder rights.

But the Securitize solution goes beyond simply encapsulating stocks. Cantor is the No. 1 investment bank in terms of U.S. equity, SPAC, and ATM issuance fundraising in 2025. It understands the core opportunity well: building a broader capital pooling channel can create huge value for U.S. listed companies.

On July 2, Securitize became the first American company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and simultaneously implement on-chain issuance. Its common stock code is SECZ. On the day it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, it was simultaneously logged into two public chains, Solana and Avalanche, with an issuance size of approximately US$270 million.

Two weeks later, Securitize joined hands with Cantor to officially commercialize this proven and feasible solution and provide services to other companies. Cantor exports its equity capital market team and trading network resources; Securitize relies on its SEC-registered broker-dealer Securitize Markets to provide tokenized infrastructure covering the entire process of issuance, distribution, clearing and settlement. The two parties jointly provide IPO and subsequent additional issuance services for enterprises, and enterprises can choose to have part of their shares directly born on the chain.

Theoretically, on-chain issuance allows global investors to hold U.S. securities in compliance with the same regulations as domestic investors in the United States. Tokens issued through Securitize have the same voting rights and dividend income rights as the underlying stocks registered in the shareholder register.

However, whether overseas investors can enjoy the same rights depends on local regulatory frameworks. The issuing company needs to set up a Reg S offshore share in addition to registering the issuance in the United States. Although the shares have similar equity, Securitize’s own SECZ tokens are currently only available to qualified U.S. investors.

If this equity reciprocity mechanism can be implemented, additional issuance on the enterprise chain will no longer be limited by the liquidity of the exchange's order book, and the issuance of new shares will be oriented to a broader capital pool.

The wave of tokenization at the stock issuance layer coincides with the simultaneous promotion of tokenization transformation at the settlement layer. The American Depository and Clearing Corporation DTCC is responsible for the clearing of almost all stock transactions in the United States. It has teamed up with more than 50 institutions to complete the real-time testing of SPY, QQQ, and U.S. debt tokenized transactions. The entire system is scheduled to be fully launched in October this year.

Open up the link of capital demand

Simply building infrastructure is not enough to promote industry adoption. Native crypto investors can immediately understand the convenience and value of tokenized stocks; but the vast majority of traditional investors are very unfamiliar with the concepts of blockchain and tokens.

To this end, the industry is creating a set of market entrances that are easy for traditional retail investors to understand. In the past year, Robinhood has made tokenized stocks a core business, serving 28 million deposited accounts on the platform. Recently, Robinhood relied on its own Robinhood Chain to launch stock token products for ordinary users. Users hold assets on the chain without knowing the details of the underlying public chain.

Although token-wrapped products such as Robinhood cannot bring new financing to companies, they solve a core problem on the issuer side: retail platforms such as Robinhood cultivate user habits, and investors can hold tokenized stocks through familiar apps without the need to manage mnemonic phrases. These users are very likely to become buyers of the on-chain direct stock issuance system of Cantor and Securitize in the future.

This issuance system simplifies the subsequent issuance process and makes equity financing as convenient as treasury fund allocation. Enterprises prefer debt financing because they can continue to raise funds on a rolling basis, have a large buyer group composed of monetary funds, insurance institutions, and bond trading desks, and the impact on stock prices is relatively limited. Although the 1982 shelf registration rules allow companies to continue to issue additional equity, the effect is greatly reduced - in a market with weak liquidity, new supply of shares can easily cause violent fluctuations in stock prices. Tokenized stock issuance makes up for this shortcoming, giving equity financing the flexibility of debt financing.

Potential market size

SEC data shows that U.S. companies will raise a total of approximately US$207 billion through IPOs and subsequent issuances in 2024, reaching US$219 billion in 2025. After including blank-check companies such as SPACs, the two-year scale rises to $216 billion and $246 billion respectively. In follow-on issuance business alone, there are 1,000 transactions per year, and the fundraising scale is stable at $175 billion.

The popularity of fundraising will continue in 2026. In the first half of the year, the scale of IPO financing alone was approximately US$115 billion, with the core driving force coming from the US$75 billion listing of SpaceX in the second quarter. SEC data shows that the annualized size of subsequent additional issuance remains in the range of US$175-180 billion.

Cantor’s equity business team predicts that the issuer will initially spend 5%–10% of the size of a single issuance to try tokenization channels. Even using a conservative range, the penetration rate is only 1%–2%, and relying on issuance fees, the annual market revenue can reach up to US$220 million.

• Penetration rate 1%: About 2.2 billion US dollars of funds flow through on-chain channels every year, exceeding the current total stock of tokenized equity assets;

• Penetration rate 5%: The fee market size is approaching US$330 million, equivalent to one-fifth of JPMorgan Chase’s equity underwriting revenue in 2025.

Whoever controls the distribution infrastructure can carve up this incremental market. As the IPO business is split, traditional underwriting commissions continue to be compressed (further reading: the IPO industry chain after the split), and tokenized stock issuance has become a hedging tool for investment banks such as Cantor, helping institutions seize new levels of value income.

Bet on incremental funds

At this stage, the trading volume of tokenized varieties of mainstream stocks is less than 1% of the trading volume of native exchanges. Judging from the current data, funds are mostly transferred from within the existing crypto market. However, on-chain stock issuance is expected to activate a new incremental capital pool: retail investors in Bangalore, Lagos and other places, who hold stablecoins and cannot open U.S. stock securities accounts, will be able to hold U.S. stock targets like U.S. residents in the future.

There is currently no statistics on the volume of this incremental capital, but the 4-fold increase in the scale of tokenized stocks within 12 months already indicates huge potential.

The game of value capture

Cantor has the advantage of seizing the value high ground. Its IPO business ranks No. 1 and relies heavily on SPAC underwriting. Other investment banks charge a commission of 5%-7% of the financing amount. Their core job is to visit institutions and discover demand that exceeds the market’s capacity. The on-chain issuance model will impact this traditional business. Cantor itself does not rely heavily on the roadshow underwriting model. It was through Cantor's SPAC that Securitize landed on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation of US$1.25 billion. If the token issuance reaches scale, Cantor will be able to benefit from its equity holdings regardless of who handles the issuance.

Cantor’s other cooperation projects also reflect this value capture strategy: it manages TEDA’s treasury assets, and it also jointly established Twenty One Capital, a Bitcoin treasury investment institution, with TEDA and SoftBank. The general model is to participate in the crypto industry and share the value dividends generated by emerging infrastructure in the future.

There is a rule in the financial industry: once a certain type of business becomes standardized and commissions continue to roll in, profits will be transferred to adjacent links where competition is not yet crowded.

In the capital market, blockchain derivatives, prediction markets, and token stock packaging tools have taken the lead in standardizing trading links. Nowadays, the market can predict the IPO pricing range before the official bookkeeping of investment banks; the clearing and settlement process is also being standardized, and DTCC is fully promoting tokenized settlement. The goal of Cantor's cooperation with Securitize is to standardize the work of "finding buyer needs" and make the traditional function of investment banks in the issuance of new shares no longer necessary.

Although I think it is still too early to bet on incremental funds, there is no doubt about the general direction. The current investor base on the chain is not enough to undertake large-scale additional issuances by medium-sized enterprises. But in the long term, centralized platforms like Robinhood will continue to introduce millions of retail users and cultivate an audience for tokenized stocks. Ordinary users do not need to perceive the existence of the underlying blockchain, and the threshold for use continues to decrease. The higher the popularity, the stronger the motivation for companies to choose tokenized issuance channels.

Roadshows and cumbersome distribution processes are not going away completely. For companies such as SpaceX and OpenAI that have sufficient liquidity on the chain, many tracks and companies still need to actively explore buyers, and roadshows still have value. But purely from the perspective of capital cost and operational convenience, most companies will expect equity financing to have the same experience as debt financing.