To learn more about the company and its vision, we interviewed Carlos Domingo, its CEO and co-founder. Mr. Domingo is a Barcelona native who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and an Executive MBA from the Stanford Business School, and he is a co-founder in Spice VC, the very first fully tokenized VC fund.
Carlos Domingo.
Being a technology platform, Securitize doesn’t require any licensing. However, there is quite a bit of compliance work involved. For each new client, a lot of time is spent with the legal team to make sure that all the procedures and workflows meet the client’s compliance requirements, which will vary by asset class and jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the company is in the process of obtaining a broker-dealer license that will allow it to charge clients a percent-based commission for the fundraising instead of a fixed fee.
For now, Securitize is focused on the tokenization of three asset classes: funds, mid and large-cap stocks, and real-estate. In March, a new major asset class will be introduced – debt, starting off with commercial paper and syndicated loans.
In terms of real estate, we are actively looking into the Southeast Asian market, Thailand in particular. We hope to be the first company to be involved in the tokenization of real estate over there.
The first tokens that were issued on Securitize platform were being minted on Ethereum. However, due to scalability issues, the company started looking into other blockchain platforms. “We are blockchain agnostic”, says Mr. Domingo. “We are exploring other major blockchains; in the long-run, we don’t know which one will survive. We have been approached by smaller blockchain platforms, however, it doesn’t make sense for us. We don’t believe they’ll survive”.
Recently, the news came out about Securitize tokenizing Elevated Returns’ real-estate assets on Tezos.
Tezos is great. We approached them and they were very helpful. Actually, they had to develop a token framework specifically for us.Since the company has joined the Accelerator and IBM is a big supporter of Hyperledger, we had to ask whether Securitize is looking into using Hyperledger Fabric as one of the platforms? – “We do, some clients prefer a private blockchain. The debt issuance will be done on Hyperledger”.
