DeFi Could Flip Stock Lending, Says NYSE-Bound Securitize President

When a broker lends out shares sitting in a client account, most of the revenue stays with the broker. Robinhood collects roughly 85% of the stock-lending income generated from customer positions. Charles Schwab takes about 50%. The person who owns the stock receives a small fraction or nothing.

That dynamic is the target of Securitize President Brett Redfearn. He argues that tokenized securities combined with decentralized finance protocols can redirect that revenue to the actual asset holder. The argument carries weight because Redfearn spent three years as the SEC's Director of Trading and Markets from 2017 to 2020 before joining Securitize in April 2026.

Redfearn laid out the logic in a recent interview. Tokenized securities that exist on a blockchain can be programmatically lent into DeFi lending pools without a broker acting as intermediary. The yield flows to the wallet holding the tokenized share. The mechanism eliminates the need for a custodian or prime broker to capture the spread.

Securitize itself expects to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ around July 2-3, 2026. The listing comes through a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners II that received SEC clearance and shareholder approval. The deal aims to raise approximately $400 million.

The company already holds a unique position in the tokenization space. In March 2026 the NYSE designated Securitize as its first digital transfer agent. The two organizations are collaborating on a digital trading platform for tokenized securities with 24/7 settlement capabilities.

Securitize also facilitated BlackRock's BUIDL fund, a tokenized Treasury product that demonstrated institutional demand for on-chain real-world assets.

For retail investors, the stock-lending angle is the most tangible near-term use case. If tokenized securities can truly route lending revenue directly to holders, the value proposition is immediate. An investor capturing the full lending yield on a position would see a material return boost relative to current brokerage arrangements.

Regulatory questions remain. Redfearn acknowledged that DeFi protocols interacting with regulated tokenized assets will need to handle compliance requirements that most existing platforms were not designed for. He emphasized that Securitize focuses on building the infrastructure. The broader system depends on independent developers creating applications that work with these assets.

The real bottleneck is not whether the technology works. The NYSE partnership and Redfearn's regulatory background give the thesis institutional credibility. The missing piece is whether developers actually build lending applications on top of Securitize's rails. Redfearn emphasized that Securitize builds the rails, not the applications. Independent developers hold the key to the model working.