Tokenized Equities Shed Second-Class Status

Good afternoon. Tokenized equities are growing up fast. This week unlocked two features they’ve been lacking: shareholder voting rights and transfer agent infrastructure that regulators actually recognize. Meanwhile, Meta is slipping back into stablecoins, and PayPal made crypto a core business.

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Chris, The Defiant contributing editor and Partner at Storaker Advisory

Vast commodity reserves. Locked in the ground, locked out of markets. AetherStrike tokenizes them on-chain. Every commodity. Every risk profile. Putting the real in real-world assets.

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TOP NEWS THIS WEEK

• Tokenized Equities Are Finally Getting Real Right:
  • Ondo Partners with Broadridge
  • Securitize Teams Up With Computershare
• Meta Quietly Became a Stablecoin Payments Company
• PayPal Promotes Crypto From Side Project to Core Business

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

• Coinbase AM taps Superstate to put its stablecoin yield fund on-chain
• Kraken bundles tokenized stocks with crypto in a single trade
• Stable Sea brings WisdomTree’s tokenized Treasuries to business cash management
• Maple’s SYRUP token lands on Revolut for 70M+ users
• Anchorage and M0 partner on a GENIUS Act-ready stablecoin issuance stack

TOKENIZATION / EQUITIES / RWA

Tokenized Equities Are Finally Getting Equal Rights

Tokenized equities have always carried footnotes: you get the price exposure, but not the full bundle of rights that comes with owning actual stock. No voting, no corporate actions processed through recognized infrastructure, no regulatory equivalency in custody frameworks.

Two announcements this week take direct aim at that gap:

I. The Transfer Agent Layer: Securitize and Computershare

Securitize has partnered with Computershare, the world’s largest share registry and transfer agent, "to bring U.S.-listed equities on-chain as Issuer-Sponsored Tokens (ISTs)".

Transfer agents are the backbone of the US equity system; they record ownership, process corporate actions (dividends, stock splits, mergers), and serve as the official register of shareholders for most US public companies. Computershare processes these functions for approximately 2,500 U.S.-listed companies, including roughly 58% of the S&P 500 (and more than 25,000 issuers globally).

Under the partnership structure, Computershare will serve as transfer agent for the IST positions, processing corporate actions in parallel with traditionally registered shares. Ann Bowering, CEO of Issuer Services for Computershare North America, framed the design explicitly as “to operate within the existing regulatory environment, maintaining the independence and oversight that issuers and regulators expect from a transfer agent.”

Securitize brings its own credentials to the table. The firm has tokenized more than $4 billion in real-world assets, including BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, and was named the first digital transfer agent eligible to mint blockchain-based securities on the NYSE’s upcoming Digital Trading Platform.

II. The Governance Layer: Ondo and Broadridge

Ondo Finance partnered with Broadridge Financial Solutions, the dominant US proxy voting infrastructure provider, to give holders of its 250-plus tokenized stocks and ETFs the ability to participate in shareholder voting events.

Through Broadridge’s ProxyVote platform, token holders can connect a wallet, authenticate on-chain, and submit votes with a verifiable blockchain record. They also gain access to prospectuses and regulatory filings for the underlying securities. Ondo president Ian De Bode announced token holders can “vote on any relevant shareholder event, just like you would when holding stocks in a brokerage account.”

Institutional investors, particularly those with governance mandates, have historically been unable to hold tokenized equities without either forgoing voting rights or running parallel paper processes. Broadridge’s infrastructure handles proxy voting for the majority of US public company shares; integrating wallet authentication into that system extends the same rails on-chain.

Broadridge is not a neutral bystander. Its Distributed Ledger Repo platform is leading the settlement of tokenized real assets on the Canton Network, making it simultaneously the backbone of one of the largest institutional tokenization deployments in existence.

What’s still missing

Secondary market liquidity remains thin for most tokenized equities outside of a handful of platforms. T+0 settlement interoperability with legacy clearinghouses is unresolved. And custody equivalency -whether tokenized equity holdings satisfy regulated fund custodian requirements- is still being worked through jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

The rights gap is closing. The plumbing gap is not closed yet.

Sources: Securitize x Computershare (The Defiant) · Ondo x Broadridge (The Defiant)

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MEDIA PARTNERSHIP

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STABLECOINS / PAYMENTS / CONSUMER

Meta Taps into Stablecoin Payouts

Four years after Libra imploded, Facebook’s parent is paying creators in USDC. No proprietary blockchain. No proprietary stablecoin, just yet.

Meta has begun rolling out stablecoin payouts for creators in Colombia and the Philippines: the company’s first live stablecoin product since shelving Libra in 2022. Creators in both markets can now opt to receive Facebook payouts in USDC on either the Solana or Polygon networks by connecting a compatible third-party wallet such as MetaMask or Phantom. Meta is not providing an off-ramp: recipients who want local currency must move their USDC to a third-party exchange independently.

Colombia and the Philippines are both high-remittance markets where creator monetization runs into consistent TradFi friction: dollar-denominated payouts, banking access gaps, and currency volatility.

What’s structurally different from Libra is the absence of ambition at the infrastructure layer. The new playbook is pure distribution: leverage Meta’s creator relationships and stablecoin infrastructure to deliver better, faster payouts, globally.

Recent and proposed U.S. stablecoin legislation, including the GENIUS Act, provides part of the regulatory backdrop here. Regulatory clarity on dollar-backed stablecoins gave Meta a clean runway that didn’t exist three years ago. Watch for: expansion to other high-remittance markets in Southeast Asia and Latin America, following the same playbook Stripe and Deel have used for stablecoin payouts.

How long until we see a Meta-sponsored stablecoin in the charts?

Sources: Meta stablecoin payouts (The Defiant)

PAYMENTS / STABLECOINS / CORPORATE STRATEGY

PayPal Promotes Crypto From Side Project to Core Business

PayPal announced a reorganization into three operating divisions: Checkout Solutions & PayPal; Consumer Financial Services & Venmo; and Payment Services & Crypto. The third unit folds Braintree (its merchant processing arm), SMB merchant services, value-added services, and digital assets -including PYUSD- into a single structure aimed at enterprise and merchant clients. Jeff Pomeroy will run the division on an interim basis.

The reorganization may finally usher in deeper integration of PYUSD, PayPal’s own stablecoin issued by Paxos and launched in 2023, within the fintech’s payment ecosystem. PayPal has 439 million customers and processes roughly $1.8 trillion in annual payment volume. By those numbers, PYUSD should be one of the largest stablecoins in circulation. It isn’t. One reason: crypto was a siloed product team with limited ability to influence pricing, incentives, or integration decisions across the merchant stack. Putting PYUSD on the same P&L as Braintree and SMB services creates commercial alignment that a separate product team simply cannot generate.

Payment Services & Crypto is explicitly a merchant-facing unit. PYUSD’s distribution path, one that has always been theoretically available and practically unused, now runs through a division whose leadership is accountable to merchant volume metrics — How soon we’ll have PYUSD settlement on Braintree is to be seen.

The broader context: Meta, PayPal, and DoorDash all made meaningful stablecoin moves within the same two-week window. None of them are building proprietary infrastructure. All of them are using or integrating with existing regulated stablecoin rails. The GENIUS Act created a stable enough regulatory floor that large consumer platforms are now willing to build product roadmaps around stablecoins.

Sources: PayPal reorganization (The Defiant)

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REPORT WATCH

State of Onchain Credit, from Se.ro

A comprehensive look at the on-chain private credit market: where volume is concentrating, who the key originators are, how risk is being priced, and what the path to institutional-scale adoption actually looks like. On-chain credit has been one of the fastest-growing segments of tokenized RWAs — this report maps the terrain.

OTHER STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME

Coinbase Asset Management Taps Superstate to Put Its Stablecoin Yield Fund On-Chain

Coinbase Asset Management selected Superstate FundOS to issue an on-chain share class of its Coinbase Stablecoin Yield Fund (CUSHY) on Solana, Ethereum, and Base. Investors can tokenize shares and deploy them in supported DeFi protocols — running on-chain and traditional infrastructure in parallel, with Northern Trust Hedge Fund Services administering via the Omnium platform.

Kraken Launches Crypto + Tokenized Stock Bundles in a Single Transaction

Kraken introduced auto-rebalanced bundles combining crypto with tokenized US stocks and ETFs via its xStocks offering; think S&P 500 + Bitcoin, or Big Tech + Crypto, purchased in a single trade. The bundles are not available in the United States, continuing the pattern of tokenized equity products launching internationally first.

Stable Sea Integrates WisdomTree’s Tokenized Treasury Fund Into Enterprise Cash Management

Stable Sea integrated WisdomTree’s Treasury Money Market Digital Fund (WTGXX, ~$855M) into its enterprise stablecoin platform, giving US businesses yield-bearing exposure on operating cash.

Maple Finance’s SYRUP Token Lists on Revolut Across the UK and EU

SYRUP, Maple Finance’s native token, is now available on Revolut across 39 countries with 70M+ users, putting on-chain institutional credit yield one tap away from one of Europe’s largest consumer fintech platforms. The listing extends Maple’s distribution from crypto-native venues into mainstream finance infrastructure.

Anchorage Digital and M0 Partner on a GENIUS Act-Ready Stablecoin Issuance Stack

Anchorage Digital and stablecoin infrastructure provider M0 announced a combined issuance stack for companies looking to launch US-regulated stablecoins, timed to the GENIUS Act compliance window. Anchorage provides federally chartered custody; M0 provides the issuance protocol. Together, they’re positioning as a one-stop regulated issuance stack for new entrants.

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Converge is produced by The Defiant. This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.