Author: Prathik Source: thetokendispatch Translation: Shan Ouba, Jinse Finance

A company wanting to raise $200 million can launch a commercial paper program or utilize its medium-term note (MTN) shelf issuance quota. Commercial paper, through a revolving issuance tool, quickly meets short-term funding needs; the MTN model involves the company completing a "shelf registration" with regulators in one go, and then issuing bonds in batches when market conditions are suitable. However, if the same company wants to raise $200 million through a share issuance, it must hire investment banks, spend weeks visiting fund institutions, and allocate up to 7% of the total financing amount, bearing the costs of the entire issuance process.

This is a long-standing problem in corporate finance: debt financing has become commonplace, but equity financing involves a cumbersome process.

The cause of this asymmetry is not only paperwork and regulatory rules, but the bigger problem lies on the demand side of funding.

Listed company stocks are traded within a single trading pool on the exchange, during limited trading hours. When the scale of a company's new share issuance exceeds the secondary market's capacity, investment banks or asset management institutions must conduct roadshows to find new buyers. Blockchain has the potential to break this imbalance and broaden the geographical boundaries of new share funding needs. This article will explore how tokenized infrastructure can make equity financing as flexible as debt financing, and who will capture value in this transformation. Eliminating the cumbersome process of equity financing: IPOs require roadshows, and investment bank commissions account for 5%-7% of the financing amount. Over the past few decades, the threshold for additional share issuance (subsequent equity issuance) has been lowered. In 1982, the U.S. SEC issued Rule 415, introducing the shelf registration system: qualified companies can register securities planned for issuance over the next two years at once, and then sell them in batches. The At-the-Market (ATM) mechanism takes this a step further. Companies allocate new shares to designated brokerage firms, which then release them in small, continuous increments on the secondary market, avoiding concentrated supply that could impact the stock price. Often, the market only becomes aware of the share issuance after the company releases its quarterly report. The commission for an ATM issuance is only 1%-3% of the financing amount, roughly half the cost of an IPO. However, the ATM model still has shortcomings: if a broker releases too many shares into an order book with insufficient depth, it can directly cause a drop in the stock price. Therefore, this method is only suitable for small-scale financing. For large-scale fundraising, companies still choose traditional roadshows. Companies pay IPO fees to partner investment banks, essentially purchasing the banks' ability to find buyers for new shares. Blockchain has the potential to solve this problem. Expanding Funding Channels Last week, Cantor Fitzgerald partnered with Securitize to help companies issue shares directly on the blockchain. This solution differs fundamentally from other on-chain tokenized stocks on the market. Vaidik and I previously analyzed the ownership models of various tokenized stocks: many tokenized assets are merely profit-sharing certificates, offering only price exposure without voting rights or full shareholder equity. However, the Securitize solution is not simply about packaging shares. Cantor, the top investment bank in terms of US equity, SPAC, and ATM fundraising by 2025, understands the core opportunity: building broader funding channels can create significant value for US-listed companies. On July 2nd, Securitize became the first US company to list on the NYSE and simultaneously launch its on-chain offering. Its common stock ticker is SECZ. On the same day it listed on the NYSE, it simultaneously launched on the Solana and Avalanche blockchains, raising approximately $270 million. Two weeks later, Securitize partnered with Cantor to formally productize this proven solution, offering it to other companies. Cantor provides its equity capital markets team and trading network resources; Securitize, leveraging its SEC-registered broker-dealer Securitize Markets, provides tokenization infrastructure covering the entire process of issuance, distribution, clearing, and settlement. The two companies jointly offer IPO and subsequent share issuance services, allowing companies to choose to directly issue a portion of their shares on-chain. Theoretically, on-chain issuance allows global investors to legally hold US securities, just like US domestic investors. Tokens issued through Securitize enjoy the same voting rights and dividend rights as the underlying shares registered in the shareholder register. However, whether overseas investors can enjoy the same rights depends on the regulatory framework of each region. In addition to registering and issuing in the US, issuing companies need to establish Reg S offshore tranches. Although these tranches have similar rights, currently Securitize's own SECZ tokens are only available to qualified US investors. If this equity-equal mechanism can be implemented, on-chain issuance by enterprises will no longer be limited by the liquidity of exchange order books, and new share issuance will target a broader pool of funds. The tokenization wave at the stock issuance layer coincides with the simultaneous tokenization transformation at the settlement layer. DTCC, the American Depositary Clearing Corporation, which handles clearing for almost all stock transactions in the United States, has partnered with over 50 institutions to complete live testing of tokenized trading for SPY, QQQ, and US Treasury bonds. The entire system is scheduled to launch fully in October this year. Connecting the Funding Demand Link Simply building infrastructure is not enough to drive industry adoption. Native crypto investors can immediately understand the convenience and value of tokenized stocks; however, most traditional investors are unfamiliar with blockchain and token concepts. Therefore, the industry is building a market entry point that is easy for traditional retail investors to understand. Over the past year, Robinhood has made tokenized stocks a core business, serving 28 million deposited accounts on its platform. Recently, Robinhood launched a stock token product for ordinary users based on its own Robinhood Chain. Users hold on-chain assets without needing to understand the details of the underlying public chain. While tokenized products like Robinhood's cannot bring new financing to companies, they solve a major problem on the issuance side: retail platforms like Robinhood cultivate user habits, allowing investors to hold tokenized stocks through familiar apps without managing mnemonic phrases. These users are highly likely to become buyers of on-chain direct-issue stock systems like Cantor and Securitize in the future. This issuance system simplifies subsequent issuance processes, making equity financing as convenient as treasury fund allocation. Companies prefer debt financing because it allows for continuous rolling fundraising, access to a large buyer base consisting of money market funds, insurance institutions, and bond trading platforms, while having a relatively limited impact on stock prices. While the 1982 shelf registration rule allowed companies to continuously issue new shares, its effectiveness was significantly diminished—in illiquid markets, new share supply could easily trigger sharp price fluctuations. Tokenized stock issuance fills this gap, giving equity financing the flexibility of debt financing. SEC data shows that in 2024, US companies raised approximately $207 billion through IPOs and subsequent offerings, reaching $219 billion in 2025. After including blank check companies such as SPACs, the size rose to $216 billion and $246 billion in those two years, respectively. Subsequent offerings alone see 1,000 transactions annually, with fundraising stabilizing at $175 billion. The fundraising frenzy is expected to continue in 2026. In the first half of the year alone, IPO fundraising reached approximately $115 billion, primarily driven by SpaceX's $75 billion IPO in the second quarter. SEC data shows that subsequent annualized share issuances are expected to remain in the $175-180 billion range. The Cantor equity team predicts that issuers will initially allocate 5%-10% of their offering size to tokenization channels. Even with a conservative penetration rate of only 1%–2%, the market's annual revenue could reach a maximum of $220 million, relying on issuance fees. A 1% penetration rate would result in approximately $2.2 billion flowing through on-chain channels annually, exceeding the current total amount of tokenized equity assets. A 5% penetration rate would bring the fee market size close to $330 million, equivalent to one-fifth of JPMorgan Chase's equity underwriting revenue in 2025. Whoever controls the issuance infrastructure will be able to seize this incremental market. With the IPO business being split up, traditional underwriting commissions continue to shrink (further reading: the IPO industry chain after the split), and tokenized stock issuance has become a hedging tool for investment banks like Cantor, helping institutions capture new levels of value gains. Betting on Incremental Funds Currently, the trading volume of tokenized versions of mainstream stocks is less than 1% of the trading volume on native exchanges. Based on current data, funds are mostly being transferred from within the existing crypto market. However, on-chain stock issuance is expected to activate a completely new pool of incremental funds: retail investors in Bangalore, Lagos, and other locations, holding stablecoins but unable to open US stock securities accounts, will be able to hold US stocks like US residents in the future. The exact amount of this incremental capital is currently unquantified, but the fourfold increase in the size of tokenized stocks within 12 months already indicates significant potential. [Image of a PNG file] The Game of Value Capture: Cantor possesses an advantage in seizing high-value opportunities. Its IPO business ranks first, largely relying on SPAC underwriting. Other investment banks charge 5%-7% commission on financing, their core work being to visit institutions and uncover demand exceeding market capacity. On-chain issuance models will impact this traditional business. Cantor itself doesn't heavily rely on roadshow underwriting models; Securitize went public on the NYSE through Cantor's SPAC, valuing the company at $1.25 billion. If tokenized issuance reaches a certain scale, Cantor can profit from its equity stake regardless of who provides the issuance services. Cantor's other collaborative projects also demonstrate this value capture strategy: it manages Tether's treasury assets and co-founded Twenty One Capital, a Bitcoin treasury investment institution, with Tether and SoftBank. The general model is to invest in and partner with crypto companies, sharing the value dividends generated by future emerging infrastructure. There's a rule in the financial industry: once a certain type of business becomes standardized and commissions become increasingly competitive, profits will shift to adjacent segments where competition is less intense. In the capital market, blockchain derivatives, prediction markets, and tokenized stock packaging tools have spearheaded the standardization of the trading process. Now, the market can predict IPO pricing ranges before investment banks even begin book-building; clearing and settlement are also becoming standardized, with DTCC pushing forward tokenized settlement. The collaboration between Cantor and Securitize aims to standardize the process of "finding buyer demand," making the traditional role of investment banks in new share issuances unnecessary. While I believe it's too early to bet on incremental funds, the general direction is undeniable. Currently, the on-chain investor base is insufficient to handle large-scale issuances by mid-sized companies. However, in the long term, centralized platforms like Robinhood will continue to attract millions of retail users, cultivating an audience for tokenized stocks. Ordinary users don't need to be aware of the underlying blockchain, continuously lowering the barrier to entry. Higher adoption rates will incentivize companies to choose tokenized issuance channels. Roadshows and cumbersome issuance processes will not completely disappear. Aside from companies like SpaceX and OpenAI that have ample on-chain liquidity, many other sectors and companies still need to actively seek out buyers, making roadshows valuable. However, purely from the perspective of funding costs and ease of operation, most companies would expect equity financing to offer an experience similar to debt financing.