The popular version of the tokenisation story is about expanding investor access. The familiar example is of a saver in a remote village buying fractional Apple shares on a blockchain. It is a tidy pitch, but it only solves half the problem.
Bitfinex Securities is focused on both providing access to new securities and allowing businesses to raise capital more easily by connecting to a globally distributed pool of investors. The wider market for tokenised real-world assets is worth roughly $40 billion excluding stablecoins, with some projections suggesting it could be valued in the trillions by 2030. Bitfinex Securities, for its part, crossed $500 million in listed assets in September this year.
These numbers point to growth but they do not show what the industry should be growing towards. For Bitfinex Securities, that means helping companies raise debt and equity, not just giving investors another screen to trade on.
“Tokenisation is just a convoluted way to say we have upgraded the transport layer for the same assets,” Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino said in a recent interview. “It does not change much, unless there is more work on regulatory frameworks that create the opportunity to make capital more accessible.”
The Company with One Bank
The case for tokenising securities — including fixed income — is straightforward. If a Bitfinex Securities customer, accustomed to round-the-clock trading and real-time settlement, goes back to a world of T+1 and T+2, exchange hours and market holidays, the extra friction becomes obvious.
The platform already offers zero percent maker and taker fees, settlement measured in seconds rather than days, and issuance timelines of around 20 business days — a fraction of the conventional process. As Jesse Knutson, Bitfinex Securities’ head, has written: “On-chain ownership and settlement give investors better visibility and more control.”
For Paolo, this is a great first step. “But it is the low-hanging fruit. We are focusing on a small piece of an entire elephant.”
The next focus for the company is servicing businesses that cannot access capital markets at all.
“Imagine you are an SME in the most remote place on earth,” Paolo said. “You can only go to your local bank branch. There is no competition there, so you will never obtain the optimal price for a loan. You are stuck with whatever they offer you.” A global market for small-company debt and equity would find those firms new shareholders and help businesses grow.
At the other end of the scale, liquidity is pooling around a handful of names — SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. “They caught the liquidity of the entire world. There is no space for everyone else.”
The industry could spend its time tokenising every stock on every exchange. Replicating existing markets on-chain, however, does little to address the companies that struggle to access capital in the first place. And that is exactly the kind of issuer Bitfinex Securities aims to put in front of investors.
Building from the Periphery
These efforts are supported by future-ready jurisdictions looking to capture a piece of the fast growing tokenisation market. Both Kazakhstan and El Salvador, where Bitfinex Securities is regulated, have built frameworks Paolo describes as cautious and protective of investors. Bitfinex does not want a jurisdiction “where companies without any sort of control can list. That is not good.”
Bitfinex Securities has operated in the AIFC’s FinTech Lab since 2021 and said in September 2025 that it was applying to become a full Authorised Investment Exchange. In El Salvador it received the first licence issued under the Digital Assets Issuance Law in April 2023. Bitfinex’s derivatives arm followed in January 2025 and its spot exchange in May 2026, completing the group’s set of licences in the country.
Paolo’s attachment to El Salvador goes beyond the paperwork. He described a country that was “able to change its fate” — first through the 2021 decision to make bitcoin legal tender, which put it on the map, then through a security turnaround that made new financial rails possible. Tether moved its headquarters there in 2025. “Not every politician can be Nayib Bukele.”
Building from the periphery is how Tether itself grew. USDt took years to reach meaningful scale, growing outside the traditional financial system before becoming one of the world’s largest digital assets. “Remember, with USDt, it took six years before getting to a meaningful size in terms of market cap. Tether’s moat was dug with boots on the ground, with hard work, with sweat and fatigue.”
Bitfinex Securities has a similar playbook: a product range that began with private credit and tokenised Treasuries and has since expanded into commodities, public and private equity, and fixed income. The second half of 2026 is already becoming its busiest period yet, with planned listings across public equity, ETFs, funds and private equity.
“You can say everything about our team, but definitely you have to admit that we are relentless and resilient.”
Chains Are a Hype Layer
For Paolo, Bitcoin is unique as “a transport layer for freedom and for money” — a unit of energy and proof-of-work that “does not represent a human.” Equities are different. They represent people and businesses and will trade on smart contract platforms like Ethereum and Solana.
However, for Paolo, the interest is best focused on the companies and products represented by the tokens rather than the blockchains themselves. The chain is a rail but the company is the product. “It matters for the hype that the Ethereum community or the Solana community can draw from it. And by the way, we support all of them.”
The 80 Percent Test
Asked what success could look like in another five years, Paolo did not reach for a geographic spread or an inclusion metric. His measure is cost.
“Take a company from Buenos Aires that generates $50 million per year, and is not in tech but in farming. What is the cost difference for that company to raise debt or capital through the regular market versus tokenised markets?”
Traditional equity issuance averages around 7 percent in fees. Bitfinex Securities already charges 4 percent, with zero trading fees on the secondary market.
“If in five years we cannot cut the cost for companies to go through the regulatory process, list and raise capital by 80 percent, we didn’t do a good job. Not as Bitfinex, but as an industry.”
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