Securitize Launches Blockchain Trading for 12 US Stocks Including Apple and Nvidia

Securitize Puts Apple and Nvidia Shares On-Chain

Securitize began on-chain trading of 12 US stocks on October 8, pulling familiar Wall Street names onto a public blockchain. The first batch includes Apple and Nvidia, and each product is backed by the underlying share rather than a synthetic proxy, with the announcement describing security entitlements that give holders a recognized claim on the actual equity. Trading initially runs on Solana, and continuous round-the-clock settlement is flagged as a future ambition rather than a launch feature; the company has not given a date for it. The practical difference from existing rails is settlement: shares change hands on a public chain rather than through a clearinghouse, and the choice of Solana puts major US equities on infrastructure built for near-instant finality. The launch sits inside a wider build-out that banks have been running with little fanfare. JPMorgan disclosed in September that Kinexys, its blockchain business, processes roughly $7 billion in transactions every day, a figure that places institutional tokenization well past the pilot stage. Pantera Capital president Scott Lawin describes the shift as the industry entering “the somewhat less exciting but more sustainable part of the blockchain story.” The next phase, in his framing, will be measured less by token launches and more by real adoption, revenues and scale, a change of tone after cycles in which speculative FOMO, rather than cash flow, decided which assets led. Institutions are becoming customers of crypto firms that can improve how they operate, he argues, and some of those suppliers could eventually surface as acquisition targets. He is careful about the pace, too: institutional adoption, he says, “is not an overnight thing. It happens over time.” Taken together, the two figures above, one from a tokenization platform and one from a global bank, mark Wall Street’s blockchain testing as moved into production.

Pantera’s Revenue Screen for Tokens

For investors, the question shifts from whether Wall Street will use blockchains to which tokens actually deliver a share of the business that runs them. Lawin argues institutions need a framework to assess tokens and protocols as businesses with real customers, real volumes and real revenue. His firm built one: the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index, announced in July with S&P Dow Jones Indices, requires that the blockchain project behind an eligible token post positive total revenue over the previous two completed quarters. The index’s own methodology draws a line that matters: revenue generated by a blockchain project demonstrates economic activity, but the measure makes no assumption about investor returns or cash flows. Pantera said in an August 3 post on X that the index outperformed broad blockchain-ecosystem benchmarks when backtested, applying a concentrated approach to the top performers rather than spreading exposure across the whole ecosystem. That backtest does not answer the harder question the framework raises: what financial benefit does owning the token provide, and does the mechanism connecting business income to holders work? The rights attached to a token vary widely, from pure speculation to fee sharing to whatever governance token entitlements a project grants, and revenue alone cannot establish whether a token is worth its price. Regulation adds a second layer of uncertainty. On October 5, the CFTC proposed a federal framework for exchanges offering leveraged digital-asset trading, effectively margin trading on regulated venues, after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act. The proposal leaves the broader question of crypto market oversight unsettled. Lawin expects regulators to keep moving anyway, and expects businesses seeking institutional money to face closer scrutiny of their performance over the coming year.

@PanteraCapital · X post

An August 3 post on X.

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What the Revenue Rule Does Not Guarantee

Our reading of the index methodology, the primary document behind the screen, is that its revenue rule filters for economic activity, not for investor returns: a blockchain project can clear the two-quarter revenue bar while the mechanism that routes income to token holders stays untested. That gap is where diligence will concentrate next. Attention-driven segments, from the memecoin trade to purely narrative plays, sit outside the screen by definition, since they generate no project revenue to verify. Lawin’s expectation that regulators will keep moving without waiting for Congress adds a second filter: businesses courting institutional capital should assume their reported revenue and token economics get examined line by line over the coming year.