Securitize CEO Sees Tokenized Stocks Driving RWA Market to $5 Trillion

Carlos Domingo, the CEO of Securitize, told a panel at ETHConf in New York on Tuesday that the real-world asset tokenization market will hit $5 trillion. The trigger, he said, will be stocks and ETFs, not the Treasury products that have defined the sector for the last two years.

The global equities and ETF market is worth roughly $150 trillion, Domingo said. "Only if a small percentage of that, like 2% or 3%, moves onchain, it gets you very close to that $5 trillion."

The current RWA market sits at about $30 billion. Tokenized U.S. Treasury products make up the bulk of that. Domingo argued that growth phase is maturing. Tokenized stocks, he said, offer advantages Treasuries cannot match: wider investor access, better liquidity, and stronger hooks into decentralized finance.

Securitize has already moved in that direction. The firm announced partnerships with the New York Stock Exchange and transfer agent Computershare to build blockchain-based equity trading and settlement infrastructure. It is also working toward a public offering. BlackRock counts among its institutional clients.

Domingo drew a sharp line between what he calls real tokenized equities and synthetic alternatives. "A lot of people that today say that they tokenize equities, they're not tokenizing equity," he said. Many blockchain-based stock offerings rely on derivatives or synthetic frameworks, he argued. Real tokenized equities must give investors direct share ownership, including voting rights and dividends.

His infrastructure of choice is Ethereum. Securitize uses smart contracts to restrict ownership to verified investors while keeping assets on permissionless public blockchains.

Domingo does not expect blockchain markets to replace traditional finance entirely. "The traditional markets are going to stay," he said. "We're going to see a new market emerge in parallel that will run on blockchain rails and be much more efficient." He pointed to instant settlement and 24/7 transferability as capabilities conventional markets cannot offer today.

The RWA sector remains early-stage. Domingo's view aligns with a growing consensus among industry executives that tokenized equities are the next big bridge between traditional finance and crypto infrastructure. For a broader look at how tokenization is reshaping markets, see our crypto market analysis.

A move of this scale carries implications for exchanges, custodians, and the settlement layer. If 2-3% of the $150 trillion global equities market migrates onchain, the volumes would dwarf anything the crypto market has handled to date. That would test blockchain throughput, custody infrastructure, and regulatory boundaries. Domingo's argument implies that the bottleneck is not technology but the gap between synthetic and real tokenization. The distinction matters because synthetic products carry counterparty risk, while direct ownership aligns incentives with the underlying asset. Securitize's partnerships with the NYSE and Computershare suggest the infrastructure side is further along than many market participants assume. The key unknown remains regulatory: whether the SEC and other major agencies will treat tokenized equities the same as their traditional counterparts, or layer on additional compliance requirements that slow adoption.