A Nasdaq-listed public company has put its ordinary shares on two blockchains through Securitize, giving tokenised equities their most direct test yet of whether 24/7 trading can coexist with US securities law.
Currenc Group, a Nasdaq-listed fintech trading under the ticker CURR, has tokenised its ordinary shares through Securitize and issued them on Ethereum and Solana. The announcement on 8 April marks the first time a US-listed public company has pushed its equity directly onto public blockchains through a registered transfer agent. The tokens represent the same legal claim as a conventional share — dividend rights, voting rights, the lot — but they settle on-chain and can be held in any wallet Securitize approves.
For Securitize, it is a meaningful proof point. The firm has been building tokenisation infrastructure since raising $12.75 million in 2019 to digitise the $7 trillion securities industry, and has spent the past two years running tokenised money market funds for BlackRock, Apollo and Hamilton Lane. Currenc is different. It is a living, quarterly-reporting public company rather than a single-purpose fund wrapper, which makes the legal plumbing harder and the precedent more valuable.
The design is pragmatic rather than radical. Currenc shares are fractionalised down to six decimal places, so a tokenholder can own an arbitrarily small slice, and the tokens can be posted as collateral inside DeFi protocols once those protocols complete Securitize's whitelist process. Trading is not open to anyone with a wallet. Secondary market activity has to go through Securitize Markets, its FINRA-registered broker-dealer, which means every transfer gets KYC'd and every counterparty sits inside the regulated perimeter. The result is 24/7 settlement — a real improvement over T+1 — rather than fully permissionless equity trading. That line matters; crossing it would put Securitize in direct conflict with the SEC no matter who sits in the chair.
Currenc itself is not a household name. It is a Singapore-headquartered fintech whose shares have traded thinly on Nasdaq since its 2024 listing, and it is currently in the middle of a proposed reverse merger with Animoca Brands that would fold it into a much larger crypto-adjacent holding company. The tokenisation is not a coincidence. If the Animoca deal closes, the combined entity will need settlement infrastructure that can carry crypto-native volume, and the Currenc ticker has just become the testbed for that. A parallel process at Securitize is even more telling: the firm has announced its own proposed combination with Cantor Equity Partners II, which would list Securitize under the ticker SECZ in the first half of 2026. Both companies are priming themselves for a crypto-capital-markets future in which settlement infrastructure is the product and ticker-level listings are just the distribution layer.
The real bet is that the sub-billion-dollar end of the public markets is where tokenised equity will find product-market fit first. Large-cap shares trade with tight spreads and dense liquidity in their traditional form; the case for moving them on-chain is mostly about settlement speed. For small-caps like Currenc — where liquidity is patchy, cost of capital is high, and global reach matters — the case is about new buyers. A retail investor in Seoul or São Paulo who cannot easily open a US brokerage account can hold a Securitize-issued CURR token in a compatible wallet, so long as they clear KYC. That opens up the addressable investor pool in ways a standard Nasdaq listing never could, and it lets Currenc tap secondary demand that had previously been geographically walled off.
Regulators are circling. The SEC under chair Paul Atkins has signalled that it wants a formal safe harbour for tokenised securities in its Regulation Crypto Assets proposal, which reached the White House on 6 April. That framework, if it survives the comment period intact, would give issuers like Currenc statutory certainty rather than the no-action letters they currently lean on. The Securitize-Currenc deal lands in a gap that is closing, a narrow window where early movers can establish market standards before the rules harden around them.
Whether tokenised public equity scales depends on who copies it. Securitize has said more listings will follow and has not named the candidates. The more interesting question is whether any of the large-caps, the Coinbases or Robinhoods of the world, decide that settling their own float on-chain sends a stronger signal than any press release about "embracing crypto" ever could. Currenc is a starting pistol, not a finish line.
