Fairmint CEO Joris Delanoue says tokenized equities risk repeating Wall Street's 1960s paperwork crisis unless issuers adopt fully onchain infrastructure, not hybrid models.
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Wall Street nearly drowned in paperwork once. In the late 1960s, daily NYSE trading volumes surged from roughly 5 million shares to over 12 million. The back-office infrastructure built for a quieter era collapsed. Settlement failures cascaded. Brokerages shuttered. It took the creation of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation to pull the industry back from the brink.
Joris Delanoue, CEO and co-founder of Fairmint, sees a similar structural mismatch forming in the fast-growing world of tokenized stocks.
The 1960s crisis was not caused by too many people wanting to trade. It was caused by systems that could not keep up. Manual clearing, physical stock certificates, and fragmented record-keeping turned a boom into a bottleneck. Delanoue contends today's private equity markets suffer from the same ailments: fragmentation, illiquidity, and heavy reliance on centralized intermediaries never designed for high-throughput digital transactions.
The risk, he argues, is that tokenization becomes a cosmetic upgrade rather than a structural one. If issuers tokenize equity while still relying on outdated cap table management, manual compliance checks, and off-chain settlement, the system inherits every weakness of the old model and gains none of the efficiencies blockchain was supposed to deliver.
Fairmint positions itself as an answer. The company operates as the first fully onchain-native SEC-registered transfer agent, according to its own description. It handles the official record of who owns what natively on a blockchain rather than maintaining a parallel off-chain ledger. Its core product, the Open Cap Table Protocol (OCP), has administered more than $1.6 billion in equity value across over 180 issuers and funds. The protocol runs on the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled blockchain designed for institutional financial applications.
Delanoue's influence in this space recently expanded. In December 2025, he was elected General Director of the Canton Foundation, joining leadership ranks that include representatives from institutions like DTCC and HSBC.
NYSE volumes did not increase by some unimaginable factor in the 1960s. They roughly doubled, from 5 million to 12 million daily shares. That was enough to break everything. Infrastructure gaps compound fast once volume crosses a threshold. By the time the problem is visible, it is usually too late to fix it gracefully.
Fairmint's bet is that native onchain solutions, where equity representation, compliance logic, and ownership records all live on the same programmable layer, will outperform hybrid models that bolt blockchain onto traditional systems.
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