Eight years after co-founding Securitize in 2017, Carlos Domingo is steering what has quietly become one of the core infrastructure players of the tokenized asset trade.

The firm says it has about $3.6 billion in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) outstanding as of late November and expects to finish the year above $4 billion in assets under management. Securitize is profitable — revenue has grown roughly 10x over the past 18 months — and the firm is preparing to go public via a SPAC merger with Cantor Fitzgerald’s vehicle, with a listing targeted for early next year.

“This has been the best year in the company's history, by far,” Domingo said in an interview with CoinDesk. “It’s been the inflection point we’d been waiting for.”

Doing tokenization before it was cool

If tokenization is one of crypto’s big narratives now, Domingo is quick to point out that Securitize was there when it decidedly wasn’t.

“In 2021 I would talk to investors and they’d say, ‘Why would we invest in tokenization? Look at FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, they’re growing so fast,’” he said. “I’d say, ‘Sure, but are you sure those guys will be around tomorrow?’ There were a lot of red flags. Still, we were not the cool kids on the block.”

It was a challenging path. Securitize had to raise fresh funding roughly every 18 months, with modest rounds compared to the mega-raises going to unregulated trading platforms.

Hiring talent was harder, too. “We couldn’t give people big token packages. We couldn’t pay the highest salaries,” Domingo said.

What kept him going was conviction and a bit of survivalist philosophy.

“One of our board members, Brad Stephens from Blockchain Capital, told me: you need to be like a cockroach,” Domingo said. “Digitization of any industry is unavoidable, the only thing you don’t know is when. So you need to make sure you don’t die before it happens.”

He’s blunt about what happened to early tokenization rivals. “If you look at the companies that looked like they were going to dominate, most disappeared, ran out of money or sold on bad terms,” he said. “Being early is a problem if you don’t survive.”

Carlos Domingo will be speaking at CoinDesk's upcoming Consensus Hong Kong in February and Consensus 2026 in Miami in May.

From tech vendor to one-stop shop

When Securitize launched, Domingo thought he was building a software company.

“The original idea was to sell a tokenization platform as technology,” he recalled. Banks, asset managers and other issuers would license the stack, tokenize their assets and handle everything themselves. Securitize would just ship code.

It took less than a year for reality to bite. “In 2018 it became very clear we needed to pivot from being a technology provider to being a service provider,” he said. “The people that have financial assets are not technology companies. They expect somebody to provide service to them – that’s what BNY, State Street or SS&C do.”

That led Securitize to pursue licenses and roles that live deep in the plumbing of traditional finance. The firm became a registered transfer agent in the U.S., then added a broker-dealer, an alternative trading system (ATS), an investment adviser and fund administration capabilities. The transformation culminated with the acquisition of MG Stover’s unit, turning Securitize into the largest digital-asset fund administrator.

Today, instead of selling a tokenization toolkit, Domingo pitches a one-stop shop to bring assets onchain.

“We go to an asset manager and say: we’ll form the fund, we’ll put your securities onchain, we’ll integrate with the blockchains and DeFi, we’ll do distribution, fund admin, everything,” he said. “You do what you do well — manage assets. We do everything else.”

He traces that strategy back to a dog-eared copy of “Crossing the Chasm,” Geoffrey Moore’s classic on commercializing new technologies. The core idea: early adopters are happy to stitch together multiple vendors; the mainstream market is not.

“To cross the chasm, you have to offer the whole product,” Domingo said. “People are not going to piecemeal build things by putting together five different providers."

BlackRock, Binance and the collateral phase

The company has now moved far beyond survival, lining up a powerful roster of backers including BlackRock, Jump Crypto and Cathie Wood's ARK Invest. Securitize helped bring BlackRock’s tokenized fund to market last year and has since expanded it across multiple blockchains, including Solana and BNB Chain. It’s currently the largest tokenized U.S. Treasury offering, with a roughly $2.5 billion market cap. It also lined up a powerful roster of backers Ark Invest, BlackRock and Jump Crypto.

Domingo said the important shift isn’t just about putting securities on a “better ledger,” but, instead, what happens after that. The use case he emphasized is collateral.

“We’re very bullish on collateral,” he said. “You can take high-quality collateral like people use in TradFi, but move it at crypto speed, 24/7, with the quality of collateral institutions expect.”

Securitize has worked with venues like Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by volume, on using tokenized RWAs as collateral in derivatives and other products. It's the kind of plumbing that doesn’t trend on social media, but it’s where Domingo sees tokenization starting to matter for the broader crypto market structure.

Heading for the public markets

The SPAC listing is both a milestone and a new kind of pressure.

“I’m very excited about finally going public. It’s going to be a defining moment for us,” he said. “It’s also scary. I’ve never been CEO of a publicly traded company.”

While Securitize’s year may look like an overnight success, from Domingo’s point of view, it’s the delayed payoff for being early and refusing to leave.

“Now it’s not about whether the industry is happening or not,” he said. “It’s about how much market share we can capture and retain. We’ve been talking about this for eight years. Finally, everybody else is talking about it too.”