Robinhood, Coinbase, and Kraken have been focused on tokenized stocks, and Fairmint is reportedly building the infrastructure they’ll need.
In an in-depth conversation with Joris Delanoue, CEO and co-founder of Fairmint, we learned about the latest tokenization trends.
Tokenized securities. DeFi regulation. Onchain equity. According to Delanoue, everyone’s talking about the future of capital markets, a future that Fairmint claims it started building years ago.
While most of the industry is getting started, Joris Delanoue says he has spent the last years laying the foundation.
Fairmint, which he co-founded in 2019, is enabling / supporting onchain equity.
The company operates as an SEC-registered transfer agent, initiated the Open Cap Table Protocol (OCP), and says it has processed more than $1 billion in equity natively onchain.
As onchain finance takes center stage, CI sat down with Joris shortly after he attended to Robinhood Keynote in Cannes to get his take on how we got here, and where this is all going.
Our conversation with Joris Delanoue is shared below.
Crowdfund Insider: Let’s start with the fundamentals. What is onchain equity, and why does it matter?
Joris Delanoue: Onchain equity means issuing and managing company shares directly on a blockchain. Instead of spreadsheets and PDFs, you have programmable smart contracts that reflect ownership, transfer rules, and compliance conditions – all in real time. That means you can track all changes and everything is always up to date.
For founders, it’s a game-changer. They can embed rules like investor eligibility, transfer restrictions, or price thresholds right into the equity itself. For shareholders, it means self-custody. You’re not just listed in someone else’s private database. You actually hold your shares in your own onchain portfolio, with the ability to see, verify, and transfer them, if conditions allow.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you can transfer to just anyone at any time. U.S. securities laws still apply. Transfers are only allowed within the bounds of the applicable exemptions. But even with these safeguards, you now have a much simpler, more transparent experience for everyone involved.
Crowdfund Insider: The idea of tokenized securities is nothing new, but now the SEC, Robinhood, and Coinbase are all taking it seriously. Is the industry late?
Joris Delanoue: I wouldn’t say late, I would say Fairmint has been early for the right reasons. We started building the infrastructure in 2019, because we saw where the market would go. Now it’s happening.
The major players, Robinhood, Kraken, Coinbase, even DTCC, they’re validating what we’ve been saying all along: that capital markets are moving onchain. The difference is that while many are still at the “wrapper” stage, taking traditional securities and just representing them as a token, we went full native.
Fairmint is the first and only platform to build a complete onchain equity stack, fully integrated with U.S. securities law. We’re not tokenizing a spreadsheet, we’re turning the cap table itself into programmable infrastructure.
That said, larger companies like Robinhood, they can’t move with the same flexibility as a startup. It takes time for a large company to make moves, but when they do move, they will move big and they will move fast. So while they are in phase one right now, what I love about that is that they are proving that we were right. A lot of people are starting to look for ideas to make securities better, and they will either copy us or come to us to show them how to do it, and that’s already what’s happening, to be honest.
Crowdfund Insider: Why should a founder go onchain from day one instead of waiting for an IPO?
Joris Delanoue: Because the IPO path, while still valid, is no longer the only path, and it’s certainly no longer the most efficient.
Let’s take Stripe as an example. Incredible company, but they didn’t want to go public. However, they still needed to unlock liquidity for employees. That meant months of legal work, expensive fundraising, and dilution, just to solve a single use case. That entire process could have been automated if they had built onchain from day one.
With onchain equity, a founder can issue equity, manage their cap table, and even enable pre-defined liquidity for early investors or employees, all while retaining full control. They can decide who can buy, how much, and when. All of that is embedded into a series of smart contracts, not sitting in a vendor, locked in databases or between multiple law firms’ inboxes.
And for employees, equity becomes useful again. They can access some liquidity without waiting for an IPO or acquisition, whether it’s helping them buy a house, pay for their child’s schooling, or taking a bucket list vacation. That’s powerful. The players who understand that, they are like, ‘Wow, actually this is revolutionary.’
Crowdfund Insider: Is this a full replacement for IPOs, or will both models coexist?
Joris Delanoue: They’ll coexist, but IPOs will inevitably evolve. The traditional IPO process is expensive, slow, and built for an analog world. But we’re in an age of real-time data, 24/7 access, and global markets. People are used to live settlement, instant access, and no off-hours, especially the generation of investors who have been interacting with crypto for more than a decade now. They’re not going back to waiting until Monday morning to trade or stopping on Friday because exchanges are closed.
So yes, IPOs will still exist, but they’ll move on-chain. The infrastructure will change. What we call “going public” will evolve when going on-chain. This transformation isn’t optional; it’s inevitable.
Crowdfund Insider: Fairmint is now on the Canton Network, Robinhood invited you to the Cannes keynote, it’s clear momentum on this is starting to pick up. What does the future look like?
Joris Delanoue: At the keynote, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev outlined on a chalkboard a phased roadmap for bringing stocks onchain, starting with basic token wrappers and evolving toward more integrated, programmable systems. When Vlad drew that roadmap, it was clear the industry is still early. Most players today are in what he called Phase 1, wrapping existing securities onchain but keeping traditional infrastructure behind the scenes: offchain settlement, legacy compliance processes, and fragmented cap tables.
Fairmint is already operating beyond that. From day one, we built for native onchain equity, not as a wrapper, but as infrastructure. So when I saw that chalkboard of Vlad, it really resonated. It showed that we’re all moving toward the same future, one where equity is programmable and natively onchain. In a way, we are Phase 4 on Vlad’s chalkboard. That’s why we built this infrastructure early, so that when platforms like Robinhood, Kraken, Coinbase or even Fidelity are ready to move, the rails are already in place. We are ready to build the future.
Crowdfund Insider: What comes next?
Joris Delanoue: Those big platforms need to stop chasing tokenized OpenAI and SpaceX shares after the fact. Instead, they should ask: “How do we bring the next OpenAI onchain, from day one?”
It’s about thinking ahead, getting ahead of the curve, because the next OpenAI, the next SpaceX, those next breakout companies are private today. But with our infrastructure, the big platforms could offer early access to the next generation of iconic companies, before they’re public, before they’re massive. That’s where the value is. That’s where capital formation becomes democratized.
Every broker-dealer, every transfer agent, every equity transaction will eventually need programmable infrastructure to compete. The question isn’t whether equity will move onchain—it will. The real question is whether you want to spend years rebuilding the foundation or start building on open infrastructure that’s already live and built for everyone.
We didn’t just anticipate that shift; we built the open rails so it can happen now