Carlos Domingo, Founder and CEO at Securitize

In this episode of The Scoop, Frank Chaparro and Teo Leibowitz interview Carlos Domingo, CEO and Co-founder of Securitize. Carlos touches on what securities have to gain from being tokenized, the future of the tokenized security platform landscape, and the advantage of taking tokenized security route vs. traditional finance. Frank, Teo, and Carlos also touch on what separates Securitize from their competitors.

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Domingo co-founded Securitize in 2017 to build compliance infrastructure for issuing and managing security tokens, digital assets structured to represent regulated securities such as equity or debt rather than the utility tokens that dominated the 2017 ICO boom. By mid-2019, the industry had shifted meaningfully toward security tokens as ICOs faced regulatory crackdowns and investor skepticism following the prior year's bust, with Securitize positioning itself as a platform that could handle the full lifecycle of a compliant token offering, from issuance through cap table management and eventual secondary trading. The episode captures Domingo making the case for why tokenized securities represented a more durable path forward for blockchain-based capital markets than the largely unregulated token sales that preceded them.

The conversation covers the practical mechanics Domingo's platform addressed: automating compliance checks like accredited-investor verification and transfer restrictions directly into a token's smart contract, working with regulators to operate within existing securities frameworks rather than around them, and building relationships with broker-dealers and transfer agents needed to service issuers. Domingo and Chaparro also discuss which categories of assets seemed best suited for early tokenization, including private equity, real estate, and venture funds, and why liquidity for those tokens remained a persistent challenge given the lack of mature secondary markets at the time.

The discussion touches on how Securitize differentiated itself from other security token platforms competing for the same early issuers, and Domingo's broader thesis that tokenization would eventually extend well beyond crypto-native companies into mainstream private capital markets. The interview offers a grounded look at the security token sector's early infrastructure-building phase, before tokenized real-world assets became a much larger and more widely discussed theme in crypto years later. It also captures Domingo's long view as someone who had previously worked in telecom innovation before moving into blockchain, a background he draws on to explain why he believed regulated tokenization, however slow to gain traction at first, would ultimately prove more consequential than the speculative token markets of 2017.