The BlackRock-backed transfer agent behind BUIDL will begin trading on Thursday under the ticker SECZ. Cantor Fitzgerald put a tokenisation firm into a public vehicle rather than sell to a strategic buyer.
Securitize completed its business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II on Wednesday, and the company's common stock will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday under the ticker SECZ. The deal raised roughly $400 million in gross proceeds after a special meeting of Cantor Equity Partners II shareholders on 29 June approved the merger with only 28.5 per cent of the SPAC's Class A ordinary shares redeemed — a low number by 2026 standards, and one that gives Securitize a public float with genuine capital behind it.
The listing is the first US-listed pure-play tokenisation firm — Securitize does not sell software licences or run an exchange or operate a stablecoin business on the side. It is a transfer agent, broker-dealer, alternative trading system and SEC-registered fund administrator, all built around the same premise: that private-market and public-market securities can be issued, held and settled on blockchains rather than through the twentieth-century plumbing that currently supports them. The company processes issuance and settlement for BlackRock's BUIDL — the largest tokenised money market fund in the industry, which sits above $2.7 billion in assets — and has similar mandates from Apollo, KKR and Hamilton Lane.
The Cantor Fitzgerald SPAC wrapper is not incidental. Howard Lutnick's firm has been positioning itself as the Wall Street bridge into crypto and tokenisation for three years now, and Cantor Equity Partners II is only one of several SPACs Cantor has raised for the sector. That Cantor put a Securitize deal into a public vehicle rather than selling the tokenisation firm to a strategic acquirer is the more interesting read; it suggests the underwriters see more upside in a standalone public market for tokenisation than in an acquisition premium.
The redemption number matters. When Cantor priced the SPAC, it needed to know how many shareholders would take the option to redeem for cash rather than roll into the combined company. Fewer than 30 per cent chose the exit. That leaves 71.5 per cent of the SPAC trust — around $215 million — inside SECZ from day one, alongside the PIPE proceeds that took the total to $400 million. The company will list with real cash to spend and no urgent need to raise again.
What Securitize will spend it on is the question. The company has been public about its ambition to move from tokenising money-market funds, a category where BUIDL now dominates, into equities, private credit, real estate and private-fund LP interests. Each of those categories is many multiples larger than the current tokenised-fund market. Each also has its own regulatory and market-structure fights. Securitize's advantage is that its infrastructure is already SEC-registered, already integrated with the major fund administrators, and already handling flows for tier-one asset managers. That is not a moat competitors can build quickly.
The competition is coming anyway. NUVA plugged $19 billion of Figure's tokenised loans into Ethereum DeFi in May. Ondo has built a parallel business tokenising Treasury exposure. Franklin Templeton has run its own tokenised money-market fund since 2021. What Securitize has, and what those competitors do not, is a fully licensed broker-dealer and ATS stack. That is the licence combination that lets the same platform issue a security and provide a secondary market for it. Buying that stack is expensive and slow. Building it from scratch is worse.
The listing timing is not accidental. Wall Street has spent the last twelve months talking about tokenisation as the next multi-trillion-dollar market, and analysts at Bernstein, McKinsey and the BIS have all published notes putting the addressable market for tokenised real-world assets somewhere between $2 trillion and $16 trillion within the decade. Those numbers are speculative; the point is that they exist, and that they are being used by treasurers and pension trustees who now have to explain why they are not exploring the category. A public Securitize is a way for those buyers to get exposure without picking individual protocol tokens.
There is a note of caution. Cantor Fitzgerald's previous SPAC foray into crypto — the Bitcoin-focused Twenty One Capital combination, which closed in 2025 — has spent the last twelve months trading below its deal price. The Wall Street habit of using SPACs to bring crypto-adjacent businesses public has not consistently rewarded holders. The SECZ trade will be a test of whether tokenisation is a durable industrial category or another wrapper on top of the same bitcoin correlation.
Trading opens Thursday. The prospectus prices SECZ at $10 a share. The 71.5 per cent of Cantor's Class A shareholders who chose not to redeem now find out whether they were right.
