Who Is Carlos Domingo and How the Securitize CEO Just Got the Keys to Tokenize Wall Street

On May 4, 2026, FINRA quietly handed Carlos Domingo's company the regulatory stack that traditional Wall Street took a century to build, except built for tokens. Securitize Markets LLC became the first US broker-dealer cleared to custody tokenized securities, settle them atomically against stablecoins, and underwrite tokenized IPOs and secondary offerings inside its own alternative trading system. Securitize is also pushing toward a Nasdaq listing in the first half of 2026 through a $1.25 billion business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II, currently trading under the ticker CEPT before it converts to SECZ.

The man at the center of all of it is a Spanish-born former telecom executive who has spent the last nine years arguing that securities belong on a blockchain, and just got the green light to prove it. Here is who Carlos Domingo is, the path that brought him to this moment, and why traders watching the tokenized real-world asset trade should understand the name.

The Short Biography

Carlos Domingo was born in Spain and built his early career as a computer scientist long before tokenization existed as a category. He earned a bachelor's and a PhD in computer science from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, completed a master's at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and later picked up an executive education credential at the AeA/Stanford Executive Institute through Stanford Graduate School of Business. He speaks English, Spanish, and Japanese, and is now based in Miami.

The career arc before Securitize is what most people miss. Domingo joined Telefónica in 2006 to run R&D in Barcelona, then climbed into bigger operating roles, ultimately serving as CEO of New Business and Innovation at Telefónica Digital. Along the way he sat on the boards of TokBox, Tuenti, and Jajah, and helped launch Wayra, the Telefónica-backed startup accelerator. From 2014 to 2017 he ran product and digital services at Mobily and du in the Gulf, building telecom platforms and smart-city infrastructure for two of the region's largest carriers.

That telecom background matters more than it might sound on paper, because the whole pitch behind tokenization is plumbing. Settlement rails, identity, custody, and reporting are all infrastructure problems, not trading problems. Domingo spent two decades building exactly that kind of plumbing before he ever touched a blockchain.

How Securitize Started

In 2017, Domingo co-founded SPiCE VC, one of the first venture capital funds to issue itself as a tokenized security on a public chain. SPiCE was less famous than Securitize but more important to the origin story. The fund needed an issuance and compliance platform that did not exist, so Domingo built one. That platform became Securitize, founded the same year alongside co-founder Jamie Finn.

For the first five years the company was a niche infrastructure player. Securitize handled cap-table tokenization, KYC, transfer agent duties, and compliance for a handful of crypto-native funds and a slow trickle of traditional issuers experimenting with the format. The transformation came in March 2024 when BlackRock chose Securitize to tokenize and administer the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, known onchain as BUIDL.

BUIDL was BlackRock's first tokenized fund on a public blockchain. It started as an Ethereum-based product backed 1:1 by cash, US Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements. Within four months it had crossed $500 million in assets. Two months after that, BlackRock led a $47 million strategic investment round into Securitize, with Hamilton Lane participating as an investor. By late 2025 BUIDL had grown to roughly $2.5 billion and expanded across multiple chains including BNB Chain, Aptos, Solana, Polygon, and Avalanche, with all of it tokenized and serviced by Securitize.

What Securitize Actually Does

The simple way to think about Securitize is that it is a tokenization-era version of the back office every public security needs to function. A stock or a fund cannot simply exist on its own. It needs an issuer, a transfer agent, a registrar, a broker-dealer to bring it to market, an alternative trading system or exchange to trade it, and a custodian to hold it for clients. Wall Street has separate companies handling each of those roles. Securitize has been quietly licensing them all under one roof.

The corporate stack today looks like this:

The asset list under management already runs through the names every traditional allocator knows. Apollo's tokenized diversified credit fund, Hamilton Lane's tokenized senior credit and equity opportunities funds, KKR exposure, VanEck products, and BlackRock's BUIDL all run on Securitize rails. As of October 2025, the firm reported north of $4 billion in tokenized assets under management.

What Just Changed on May 4

The FINRA approval is the piece that turns Securitize from infrastructure provider into a one-stop tokenized capital markets venue, with three discrete approvals landing at the same time.

Custody of tokenized securities inside the broker-dealer. Until now, the regulatory model required tokenized securities to live with a separate qualified custodian, with the broker-dealer handling order flow and execution. FINRA's approval lets Securitize Markets hold the tokens directly for clients, the way a traditional broker-dealer holds shares of Apple or a Treasury bill in your account.

Atomic settlement against stablecoins inside the ATS. Traditional securities settlement runs T+1 in the US, with cash and securities moving on different rails through different intermediaries. Atomic settlement means the security and the payment exchange in the same blockchain transaction or not at all. The risk of one leg failing while the other completes vanishes because the two legs are the same leg. The Block's coverage flagged this as the most consequential change in tokenized market structure in years.

Underwriting tokenized IPOs and secondary offerings. Securitize Markets is now permitted to act as underwriter on primary issuances of tokenized equity and on secondary offerings, the same activities a traditional investment bank performs for a Nasdaq IPO. The implication is that a company can be issued, marketed, sold, custodied, and traded entirely inside a single regulated tokenized stack.

Securitize's own announcement framed it as a one-stop framework. Domingo, on the call, was more measured. His framing was that integrating custody inside the broker-dealer enables faster settlement without compromising oversight. That is the same argument he has been making in conference talks for nine years. The difference is that as of May 4 it has FINRA's signature on it.

Why Wall Street Was Watching

The reason this matters beyond Securitize is that the company is now functionally the first credible end-to-end onchain version of what NYSE, DTCC, and the major investment banks do collectively. The unbundled US securities market has roughly fifteen specialized roles handled by fifteen different licensed entities. Securitize just consolidated four of the most regulated ones inside a single broker-dealer with regulator buy-in.

For traders, the practical effect is that future tokenized stock issuances, tokenized credit funds, and tokenized IPOs will increasingly route through Securitize rails. The names already pointing in that direction are the obvious ones, with Apollo and KKR running tokenized private credit, BlackRock anchoring the short-duration treasury category, and Hamilton Lane covering tokenized private equity exposure. Each of them gets institutional-grade compliance plus 24/7 settlement plus programmable composability with stablecoins. None of them get that elsewhere right now.

The Cantor SPAC merger gives the deal its public market dimension. Securitize agreed in October 2025 to combine with Cantor Equity Partners II at a $1.25 billion equity value. The deal includes a $225 million PIPE financing led by Arche, Borderless Capital, Hanwha, InterVest, and ParaFi, plus the $244 million sitting in CEPT's trust. The combined entity will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker SECZ, with closing expected in the first half of 2026.

For investors, that creates a pure-play tokenization equity that did not exist on US public markets before. Coinbase is a crypto exchange, Robinhood is a retail broker, and Strategy is essentially a leveraged BTC vehicle with a marketing budget. None of them are the back-office, transfer-agent, custody-and-issuance pure play that Securitize will become once the merger closes.

The Wider RWA Backdrop

Tokenized real-world assets crossed $35 billion in onchain value during October 2025 according to data tracked across Phemex's tokenization coverage, with BUIDL leading the institutional category. The number kept climbing into 2026 as more allocators added tokenized treasury exposure to portfolios, and as Coinbase named Centrifuge the preferred tokenization backbone for Base in a separate deal earlier the same week.

The competitive picture is sharpening fast across multiple fronts. Centrifuge is going hard at the Base ecosystem after Coinbase named it the preferred tokenization layer. Ondo Finance has its own tokenized treasury products and a vertically integrated chain. Goldman and BNY have a joint custody and tokenization play. JP Morgan's Onyx is pushing institutional repo onchain. None of them currently have what Securitize has, which is a single broker-dealer cleared to handle the entire lifecycle from issuance to custody to atomic settlement to secondary trading inside one ATS.

That moat is what Domingo has been positioning around since SPiCE VC. The bet was always that the eventual winner of tokenization would not be the chain or the token, but the regulated stack underneath. As of May 4, the bet is closer to validated than it has ever been.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Carlos Domingo the sole founder of Securitize?

No. Domingo co-founded Securitize in 2017 alongside Jamie Finn, who served as president of the company for several years. Domingo serves as CEO and is the public-facing leader, but the founding story includes Finn and the original SPiCE VC team that built the underlying compliance stack.

What is the difference between BUIDL and a tokenized stock?

BUIDL is a tokenized money market fund holding cash and short-duration Treasuries, designed to function as a yield-bearing onchain dollar substitute for institutions. A tokenized stock represents direct equity in a company. Securitize handles both formats but they sit under different SEC rules and serve different investor needs. BUIDL is closer to a stablecoin with yield. Tokenized stocks are closer to traditional shares moved onto a blockchain.

Will Securitize go public under the ticker CEPT or SECZ?

CEPT is the temporary SPAC ticker for Cantor Equity Partners II, the special purpose vehicle Securitize is merging with. After the deal closes in the first half of 2026, the combined company is expected to retire the CEPT ticker and trade on Nasdaq as SECZ. CEPT shares already function as a forward bet on the tokenization business while the merger waits for regulatory and shareholder approval.

Does the FINRA approval mean Wall Street IPOs will move onchain immediately?

Not immediately, but the framework now exists where it did not before. Most large traditional IPOs will continue running through the existing NYSE/Nasdaq/DTCC pipeline because of distribution and liquidity concerns. The first tokenized IPOs are likely to be smaller issuers, crypto-adjacent companies, and tokenized funds before any megacap follows. The interesting question is which mid-cap or growth IPO uses Securitize Markets first as a proof of concept.

Bottom Line

Carlos Domingo just turned a nine-year argument into a regulated business. Securitize is now the first broker-dealer in the US permitted to custody tokenized securities, settle them atomically, and underwrite tokenized IPOs from inside its own ATS, with $4 billion in tokenized assets already running through its rails. The names already routed through that stack include BlackRock, Apollo, Hamilton Lane, KKR, and VanEck, and the SPAC closing later in 2026 will give public market investors the first true tokenization pure play on Nasdaq.

The catalysts to watch are concrete. The first tokenized IPO underwritten by Securitize Markets will be the proof point that turns the regulatory approval into revenue. The CEPT-to-SECZ ticker conversion and Nasdaq listing close out the public-company arc. And BUIDL's continued growth across chains is the leading indicator for tokenized treasuries becoming the default cash vehicle for crypto-native institutions. If Domingo is right that the back office is where tokenization is won, May 4 was the day he locked the door behind him.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.