As an infrastructure provider, RedStone is exceptionally positioned to gather and distribute insights from the greatest thought leaders in the space, and since education is a big part of making onchain finance real, we’ve created The RedStone Podcast: a short-form interview series where we sit down with some of the sharpest minds in the industry for about five minutes to ask the real questions. No hour-long tangents, no filler.
Each week we sit down with a founder, an asset manager, or a market-infrastructure leader, and get straight to where institutional finance and crypto really meet. First up: Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize.
Carlos Domingo is the co-founder and CEO of Securitize, one of the firms that has taken tokenization from the pitch deck to the stock exchange. Securitize has been on a mission to tokenize the world since 2017. In 2022 it put KKR’s fund onchain, the first time a major global asset manager had done so. In 2024 it became the partner behind BlackRock’s onchain money market fund. And in July 2026 it listed on the NYSE and tokenized its own stock the same day, the first newly public company to do so.
When Carlos describes what institutions want from tokenization, he is not guessing at the demand side from the outside. He is the person in the room when a multi-trillion-dollar manager decides whether to put an asset onchain, and he has watched what makes them say yes and what makes them walk.
Compliant and Composable
For years the industry believed astronomical yields would carry it into the mainstream. Build the highest APY, layer on incentives, and the capital follows. Carlos describes the exact opposite instinct in the institutions he works with. Before a large manager looks at what an asset earns, it wants to know the whole thing is legitimate: regulated counterparties, securities that follow the rules, proper onboarding and KYC.
For the manager deciding whether to tokenize at all, the first test is whether the asset can exist onchain cleanly and compliantly. Securitize has spent the better part of a decade proving it can, tokenizing regulated funds at scale inside a framework that meets those compliance requirements rather than working around them.
With issuance out of the way, the question changes to what the asset can actually do onchain. This is where Carlos points at infrastructure directly.
“They also look for what can they do with the assets. How price feeds can bring the asset onchain and integrate with DeFi, how proof of reserves so people know what the underlying assets are.”
That distinction matters, because tokenization and DeFi solve two different kinds of problems. Tokenizing a fund fixes friction that has always slowed traditional assets. A tokenized share can move globally in seconds instead of waiting on multi-day settlement cycles and manual reconciliation, and it settles atomically rather than at T+2. Those are old problems, finally solved.
Plugging that asset into DeFi is about opening doors traditional finance never had. Because tokenized assets are composable, the same asset can be posted as collateral, borrowed against, and unwound just as fast, with the position moved to a better lender or a different network, all with marginal fees and at light speed. Strategies that were operationally impossible before, from instant refinancing to looping for amplified yield, become routine.
No Room for Arbitrage
It all starts and ends with compliance. Every layer Carlos describes, the instant settlement, the composability, the DeFi rails, still answers to the question these firms ask first: can we do this without a regulatory or reputational problem? It’s why large, conservative managers avoid projects that issue permissionless tokens to unknown counterparties, or that block major jurisdictions to operate offshore. They are willing to test new technology. They are not willing to risk their standing with a regulator.
Carlos believes the space has to police itself, and he points back to 2021, when Celsius, BlockFi, and FTX collapsed into bankruptcies and jail time, scaring serious capital away. The lesson he draws is that the industry should stop propping up projects that play regulatory arbitrage, because those blowups scare off the institutions crypto actually needs. For him that’s the whole point. TradFi and crypto have to converge for either side to win, not stay in separate lanes.
The End of the Beginning
So how far along is any of this? Carlos’s answer is that the progress is real but the industry is still small. He calls this the end of the beginning: real progress has been made, especially since BlackRock entered the space in early 2024, but the hard part is still ahead.
Today there’s roughly thirty to thirty-five billion dollars in real tokenized assets, with the next markers at a hundred billion and then a trillion. The moment he’s really waiting for is the one where the qualifier disappears.
“The moment we don’t say tokenized funds, but we say funds, that’s the day we will have made it mainstream.” Carlos Domingo, Securitize
Frequently Asked Questions
What is proof of reserves?
A way to show, onchain, what assets actually back a tokenized fund, so other protocols and holders can verify what stands behind the token instead of taking it on trust. It is one of the two things Carlos names as what institutions want to be able to do once an asset is onchain.
What are price feeds, and why do they matter here?
Onchain price data for an asset. They are what let a tokenized fund plug into DeFi: get priced, used as collateral, and integrated by other protocols. Without them a tokenized asset just sits onchain without being usable.
How big is the tokenized asset market right now?
Carlos puts it at roughly $30 to $35 billion in real tokenized assets today. He sees $100 billion as the next mark, and a trillion dollars as the point where tokenization is large enough to be here to stay. He credits much of the recent progress to BlackRock entering the space in early 2024.
What lesson does Carlos draw from 2021?
That the industry should self-police. He points to Celsius, BlockFi, and FTX, which ended in bankruptcies and jail time and scared institutions away, and argues the space should stop supporting projects that play regulatory arbitrage so it does not repeat that damage.
About RedStone
RedStone is the data layer for institutional onchain finance, delivering secure, low-latency price feeds for digital assets, RWAs, stablecoins, LSTs, LRTs, and Bitcoin LSTs across 110+ chains. Trusted by 200+ clients, including Securitize, Morpho, Pendle, Spark, Ether.fi, Ethena, Lombard, Venus, and Compound, RedStone powers lending, stablecoins, perpetuals, and tokenized asset markets with custom pricing infrastructure built for complex onchain systems. RedStone provides data for tokenized products including BlackRock’s BUIDL, Apollo ACRED, and Hamilton Lane SCOPE. Zero mispricing events. 100% uptime. Learn more at redstone.finance.
About Securitize
Securitize, the leader in tokenizing real-world assets, is bringing the world onchain through tokenized funds in partnership with top-tier asset managers, such as Apollo, BlackRock, Hamilton Lane, KKR and others. Securitize, through its subsidiaries, is an SEC-registered broker dealer, digital transfer agent, fund administrator and operator of an SEC-regulated Alternative Trading System (ATS). For more information, please visit www.securitize.io.
