Written by: Xiao Bing

The first financial report after Securitize's IPO has thrown cold water on the entire RWA track.

On August 12th, after market hours in the U.S., this benchmark company in the tokenization industry delivered its first report since going public: the platform's tokenized asset management scale reached a record $4.3 billion, a 16% year-on-year increase; on-chain transaction volume skyrocketed by 147% to $5.3 billion.

Then turning to the revenue line: total quarterly revenue was $14.4 million, a year-on-year decrease of 5%, falling short of Wall Street's expectation of $20.6 million, with a gap of over 30%. Net loss was $21.7 million, with a loss per share of $2.37, whereas analysts expected only a loss of $0.15. Adjusted EBITDA dropped from a positive $1.8 million a year ago to negative $5.5 million.

The stock price fell 20% directly after hours. Combined with a continuous decline due to the SPAC mechanism since going public six weeks ago, Securitize's market value has sharply decreased from its IPO valuation of $1.25 billion.

Assets are on-chain, but the act of putting assets on-chain itself isn't very profitable.

A Story About "Plumbers"

Who exactly is Securitize, what do they do, and how do they make money?

In March 2024, BlackRock launched BUIDL (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund), a tokenized money market fund of U.S. Treasuries issued on Ethereum. Securitize is the provider of the tokenization infrastructure for this fund, responsible for issuance, transfer agency, compliance KYC, and brokerage transactions. By mid-2026, BUIDL's asset scale surpassed $2.5 billion, expanding to seven public chains and accepted as trading collateral by exchanges such as Binance and Deribit.

This is the most successful benchmark case for the RWA track and the brightest business card for Securitize. Traditional asset management giants like Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane, and VanEck have also issued tokenized products through Securitize's platform. Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, stated in the earnings announcement that the company manages "approximately $5 billion in on-chain assets," holding "seven tokenized assets over $100 million in scale, more than any other platform."

However, the role that Securitize plays, simply put, is that of a "plumber."

BlackRock is the water plant, deciding the price and flow of water; Securitize lays and maintains the pipes. The water plant earns fund management fees (BUIDL's management fee is charged by BlackRock), while the plumber earns piping and maintenance fees.

Securitize's revenue can be divided into two parts.

The tokenization business includes the access fees for the on-chain infrastructure and recurring fees calculated based on AUM, with this quarter’s revenue at $7.84 million, down 12% year-on-year.

The asset servicing business includes transfer agency and fund management services, with this quarter’s revenue at $6.6 million, up 3% year-on-year. Together, the total is $14.4 million.

Looking at the cost side: total operational expenses were $24.1 million, a staggering 56% year-on-year increase. Sales and administrative expenses soared 1.33 times to $8.2 million, and salary and benefits grew by 31% to $10.5 million. A company with 194 employees burned through $18.7 million merely on personnel and administration each quarter, with revenue only at $14.4 million.

Even more concerning is the quarterly sequential data. In the first quarter, Securitize had just set a record high quarterly revenue of $19.5 million, with tokenization revenue at $11.14 million and asset servicing revenue at $8.34 million. Just one quarter later, revenue plummeted by 26%. CEO Carlos Domingo used an informative term during the conference call: "softer."

$4.3 billion AUM, why did they only make $14.4 million?

This is the most worth dissecting question from this financial report.

Dividing Securitize's quarterly revenue of $14.4 million by the average AUM of $4.3 billion gives an annualized fee rate of about 1.34 basis points. 1.34 basis points. In comparison, BlackRock charges 25 basis points per year for managing IBIT (the spot Bitcoin ETF), and regular index funds also charge between 3-10 basis points. Securitize, as a tokenization infrastructure provider, earns less than one-tenth of the traditional fund management fee.

The reason lies in the position within the value chain. The profit distribution for a tokenized treasury fund roughly looks like this: the yield from the underlying assets (U.S. Treasury yields, currently around 4-5%) goes to investors; the fund management fee (10-50 basis points) goes to asset managers (like BlackRock, Apollo, etc.); custody fees go to custodial banks like BNY Mellon; the remaining amount allocated to Securitize is the tokenization platform fee and transfer agency fee. This portion is the thinnest layer within the entire value chain.

This is completely different from the "platform tax" logic in the early days of the SaaS industry.

Salesforce can charge a 15-20% revenue share for CRM software because it controls the core data asset of customer relationships, and the switching cost is extremely high. Securitize controls the action of "recording assets on-chain," and this action is being rapidly standardized. When the NYSE, DTCC, and Computershare are all building their own tokenization pipelines, how deep is Securitize’s moat?

The 147% increase in transaction volume also did not translate into revenue growth, indicating that Securitize currently has limited pricing power over on-chain transactions. With a transaction volume of $5.3 billion, the quarterly revenue of $14.4 million translates to less than 0.3 cents of income per dollar traded. The traffic passed through the platform, but Securitize couldn’t draw much water from it.

The asset management scale (AUA) in the fund servicing business is also declining, dropping from about $30 billion to $24.3 billion, a decrease of approximately 20%. The number of funds under management, at 663, appears substantial, but the average revenue contribution per fund is extremely low.

The Collective Predicament of RWA

Zooming out, the predicament of Securitize is not an isolated case.

As of July 2026, the total value of on-chain transferable tokenized assets is about $31 billion, distributed across 167 platforms and held by 960,000 addresses. This number has increased by over 300% in two years, which is stunning from a narrative perspective. But examining the underlying business model carefully reveals the problems.

Tokenized treasury bonds are the largest single category, exceeding $10 billion. The tokenization of this asset class has a low technical threshold; representing a money market fund's share using smart contracts involves core engineering concentrated on compliance and custody integration. Once the pipeline is laid out, the marginal cost approaches zero. This suggests that the tokenization infrastructure could become a "winner takes all but with thin profits" market, similar to the early IaaS layer in cloud computing. Amazon AWS ultimately proved that scale effects can turn IaaS into a cash printing machine, but the premise for AWS is that it simultaneously sells a complete set of services including computing, storage, and databases. Securitize currently only sells the single action of "moving things onto the chain."

A deeper issue is who captures the value of tokenization?

Currently, the answer is very clear: asset managers and issuers capture the vast majority of the value. BlackRock manages billions through BUIDL and earns management fees. Ondo Finance accumulates over $460 million in TVL through OUSG and USDY, and because it acts as both the asset manager and the protocol party, it can capture revenue from both the issuance side and platform side. In contrast, technical suppliers like Securitize, which are purely responsible for "moving assets onto the chain," have revenue and profit margins far below expectations.

A study by rwa.xyz revealed another inconvenient fact: Tokenization and secondary market liquidity are two different things. Issuing a token does not automatically create a tradable market, and daily trading volumes and bid-ask spreads differ greatly across asset classes. Tokenized treasury trading is relatively active, but private credit tokens have almost no liquidity. This indicates that there is still a long way to go between the vision of "tokenizing everything" and the reality of "trading all assets on-chain."

BCG and Ripple predicted in 2023 that the total scale of tokenized assets will reach $16 trillion by 2033. Even if this number is discounted to 80%, it signifies a trillion-level market. However, with a trillion-level asset management scale, what size of revenue space does that leave for Securitize with 1-2 basis points infrastructure rates?

A benchmark might help illustrate the issue: Computershare is the world's largest stock transfer agent, serving 58% of the S&P 500 companies with annual revenue of about $3.5 billion. However, Computershare manages assets far exceeding Securitize by several orders of magnitude, covering hundreds of thousands of securities globally, and it has taken years to accumulate impenetrable customer relationships and regulatory compliance barriers. If Securitize ultimately positions itself as "Computershare on-chain," then its revenue ceiling, growth path, and valuation logic should be assessed according to financial infrastructure companies, rather than high-growth technology firms. The $1.25 billion IPO valuation corresponds to less than $70 million in annualized revenue, with a price-to-sales ratio close to 18 times. By the standards of financial infrastructure firms, this valuation assumes a growth inflection point that is still far from being realized.

After this financial report, the market's scrutiny standards for the RWA track are changing. The previous question was "How fast can the tokenized asset scale grow?" Now the question is starting to become "How much can tokenization platforms earn from each dollar AUM?"