Tokenization platform Securitize and Computershare, one of the world's largest transfer agents, announced an agreement on Wednesday to enable U.S.-listed issuers to bring their equity onchain through a new construct called Issuer-Sponsored Tokens (ISTs).

Under the deal, participating issuers can include ISTs as part of their issued capital alongside existing shares, including those held in the Direct Registration System (DRS). Computershare will serve as transfer agent for the tokenized holdings, processing corporate actions for ISTs in parallel with directly registered positions, according to a press release.

Crucially, ISTs are not derivative wrappers. "ISTs do not rely on derivative tokens that sit on top of underlying shares, nor do they alter any underlying equity," said Securitize co-founder and CEO Carlos Domingo, framing the structure as a way to create direct equity ownership in token form.

That distinction matters in a market where most existing tokenized equity products, from Backed's xStocks to Dinari's dShares, rely on synthetic representations backed 1:1 by deposited certificates rather than native onchain issuance. Nasdaq's own tokenized equities filing flagged the gap between wrapper-style products and tokens that confer the same shareholder rights as traditional stock.

Computershare, listed in Australia under the ticker CPU, services more than 25,000 private and public companies globally and operates in every major financial market. Ann Bowering, CEO of Issuer Services for Computershare North America, said the structure was designed "to operate within the existing regulatory environment, maintaining the independence and oversight that issuers and regulators expect from a transfer agent."

The agreement extends a string of recent infrastructure wins for Securitize, which has tokenized over $4 billion in real-world assets, including BlackRock's BUIDL fund. Last month, Securitize was named the first digital transfer agent eligible to mint blockchain-based securities on the New York Stock Exchange's upcoming Digital Trading Platform, and earlier in April, it partnered with Nasdaq-listed Currenc Group to tokenize the company's ordinary shares on Ethereum and Solana.

RWA Boom

The Computershare deal lands as the tokenized RWA market projects sharply higher growth. A joint Keyrock-Securitize report published earlier this month forecast that the distributed RWA market will expand from roughly $29 billion today to $400 billion by 2030 as a base case, with equities highlighted as one of five asset classes positioned to scale once liquidity, regulation, and infrastructure converge.

Securitize itself is on track to become a public company through a previously announced business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II, with the combined entity expected to list under ticker SECZ in the first half of this year.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.