It Took 9 Years to Become an "Overnight Success": The Relentless Evolution of Carlos Domingo and Securitize
Source: Securitize
The Problem They Didn't Mean to Solve
When Carlos Domingo and Jamie Finn set out to launch SPiCE VC in 2017, they weren't trying to build one of the most important companies in tokenization. They were trying to solve a practical problem facing venture capital funds: liquidity. Why should investors have to wait ten years to realize value from their fund interests when ownership could theoretically be represented and transferred digitally?
The idea seemed simple enough until they ran into a much larger challenge. The infrastructure required to issue and manage digital securities in a compliant manner didn't exist. There were blockchains, smart contracts, and plenty of enthusiasm, but there was no institutional-grade framework for ownership records, compliance, investor onboarding, or transfer restrictions.
The founding insight wasn't that assets should be tokenized. It was that the infrastructure required to do it properly didn't exist.
What began as an internal solution for SPiCE VC quickly evolved into a standalone company. Securitize wasn't born from a grand vision to dominate tokenization; it emerged because the founders encountered a problem that the market had yet to solve.
Surviving the STO Collapse
The timing was far from ideal.
The years that followed saw an explosion of interest in Security Token Offerings (STOs), followed by an equally dramatic decline. Many projects focused on the issuance layer, assuming that putting an asset on-chain was the primary challenge. As enthusiasm faded, so did many of the companies attempting to build the category.
Securitize took a different path.
Rather than focusing solely on token issuance, the company gradually expanded into the less glamorous parts of financial infrastructure. Investor onboarding, compliance, ownership records, transfer restrictions, and secondary trading all became part of the broader vision.
This strategy required patience and a willingness to embrace regulation rather than avoid it. In 2019, Securitize became an SEC-registered transfer agent, allowing it to legally maintain shareholder records and cap tables. It later expanded its capabilities through broker-dealer and Alternative Trading System (ATS) infrastructure, creating a compliant pathway for secondary trading.
Securitize realized that tokenization wasn't an issuance problem—it was an infrastructure problem.
By the early 2020s, the company was no longer simply helping firms issue digital securities. It was building an increasingly complete operating system for tokenized assets.
The Institutional Flywheel
The payoff wasn't immediate.
Before BlackRock, there were years spent working with institutions such as KKR, Hamilton Lane, Apollo, and VanEck. These partnerships helped demonstrate that tokenization could operate within the expectations and requirements of traditional capital markets.
Each successful deployment created credibility. Each successful deployment reduced perceived risk for the next institution.
Every successful institutional deployment made the next institutional deployment easier.
Over time, this created a flywheel that proved difficult for competitors to replicate. The value wasn't just in the technology. It was in the trust that had been built with regulators, asset managers, and investors.
When Wall Street Came Calling
By the time BlackRock decided to launch BUIDL, its tokenized money market fund, Securitize had spent years positioning itself as one of the few companies capable of supporting institutional-scale tokenization.
BlackRock didn't need another blockchain startup. It needed infrastructure.
The decision to partner with Securitize was less a breakthrough moment than a validation of a strategy that had been unfolding for years. Today, the company supports billions of dollars in tokenized assets, operates across multiple blockchain ecosystems, and continues to expand its role within the broader financial system. Its planned public market debut at a reported valuation of approximately $1.25 billion marks another milestone in that journey.
The Bigger Lesson
The Securitize story demonstrates that institutional adoption requires far more than blockchain technology alone.
In the early days of tokenization, much of the industry focused on the asset itself. The assumption was that once ownership could be represented on a blockchain, adoption would naturally follow. In reality, institutions needed much more than token issuance. They needed compliance frameworks, investor onboarding, ownership management, transfer restrictions, and regulated pathways for secondary trading.
Securitize recognized that these operational and regulatory requirements were not obstacles to tokenization, they were prerequisites for it.
While many companies focused on bringing assets onto blockchains, Securitize focused on solving the operational and regulatory challenges surrounding them. By building the infrastructure required to issue, manage, and distribute digital securities, the company positioned itself at the center of institutional tokenization.
In the end, blockchain may have been the enabling technology, but infrastructure was the real product.
Written by Alyaqootah Khaled