Bitfinex Securities and Tokenised Capital Markets: The First $400 Billion
Dear Investors,
In the five years Bitfinex Securities has been operating we have witnessed the birth of a new capital market: its full impact has still to be felt.
Tokenised securities (STOs) and real-world assets (RWAs) are delivering returns to rival traditional assets, with few of the constraints of the legacy system. This September, Bitfinex Securities marks its fifth anniversary. Five years of being early to this seachange.
First: a word about purpose. Everything we build reflects the ideals set out in Bitfinex’s Freedom Manifesto, which is a commitment to open, peer-to-peer systems that allows participants anywhere to transact freely.
For most of our history these views were not fashionable. We have held to them anyway, because we believe they are right, and because well-designed tokenised issuances put them into practice.
The Crucible Of A New Market
Bitfinex Securities was the first tokenised securities platform to join the regulatory sandbox at the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC). Today we operate a global fully functional alternative to traditional market venues. More than $500 million in assets are now listed on the platform.
Completeness, more than scale, is what tells us the proof-of-concept era is over. We have now taken instruments through full product cycles: issuance, coupon payments, secondary trading, and the return of investor principal. We operate under dual regulatory oversight, licensed in El Salvador and in the AIFC. We support both primary capital raises and continuous secondary markets. And we have shown in live operation that traditional instruments (Treasuries, bonds, equity interests, fund units) can run on digital-asset rails, including USDt-denominated coupons and settlements.
In the early 2020s, the RWA market, excluding stablecoins, was measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Today it stands at almost $40 billion. By the end of the year tokenised capital markets could grow to more than $100 billion with the top end of expectations calling for a 10x gain from the current $38 billion to $400 billion.
Growth has brought diversification. Early activity was heavily concentrated in private credit and, later, in tokenised US Treasuries and money-market funds. Those categories remain the largest, but the market now includes substantial volumes in commodities (particularly gold), public and private equity and an array of fixed-income products.
We expect money-market funds, tokenised Treasuries, and fixed income to continue to dominate market share due to their additional utility as trading collateral. And we still hold that tokenised equities will boost secondary-market activity as this will likely drive further capital formation.
Tokenisation Delivers
In this new market, we can deliver near-instant settlement, 24/7 trading and lower costs for both investors and issuers. Due to global distribution, issuers can raise capital efficiently, with few intermediaries, and investors gain continuous access, fractional ownership and enhanced custody.
On Bitfinex Securities, these are not abstractions. Trading fees are zero, 0 percent maker and 0 percent taker — so more of an investor’s capital stays at work. There is no T+2 waiting period, so no capital is tied up between trade and settlement and no counterparty exposure in the window between.
For equity issuers, fees start at 4 percent, against a traditional average of roughly 7 percent for a raise of $30 to $50 million in traditional markets, with a regulatory approval window of 20 business days. Onboarding is unified, and most instruments carry no minimum investment thresholds. None of this comes at the expense of oversight: token transfers are whitelisted so that only KYC- and AML-verified accounts can send, receive or hold assets on the platform.
The benefit we care about most is also the least understood: control. Clients can withdraw their assets, self-custody them, or trade them peer-to-peer. On-chain ownership and settlement give investors better visibility and more control over what they own, reducing reliance on layers of gatekeepers. This is the Freedom Manifesto expressed in market structure, and we run the platform accordingly.
From Sandbox To Licence
For many years, commercially viable regulatory oversight was one of the hardest parts of the puzzle to place. However, regulatory approaches are maturing in step with the market, nudged along by some of the largest players in finance. Incumbent capital centres, among them the EU, the UK, the US, Singapore, and Hong Kong, have clarified the treatment of tokenised securities under existing securities laws while introducing targeted innovations. But much of the real action and innovation is happening outside the traditional financial centres.
The Astana International Financial Centre has supported successive increases in our platform capacity limits, first to $310 million and then higher. We are now applying to graduate from the regulatory sandbox to a full Authorised Investment Exchange licence, which will demonstrate how far the platform and the framework have come.
In El Salvador, the Digital Assets Issuance Law and the creation of the Comisión Nacional de Activos Digitales (CNAD) established one of the most comprehensive digital-asset frameworks in the Americas. Bitfinex Securities received the first Digital Asset Service Provider licence in April 2023, and CNAD has since licenced more than 70 digital-asset service providers. We were pleased to be first and to continue to play a leading role in the developing market.
The Next Chapter of Growth
Five years ago, tokenised securities were viewed as niche, experimental, and primarily of interest to crypto-native investors. We said then that the technological advantages of tokenisation were too big to ignore, and that institutional adoption was an inevitability.
Today, asset managers, banks and institutional investors are building, piloting or allocating to tokenised products. They are waking up to the fact that this “interesting technology experiment” can expand markets and create much wider access than ever before.
Why should investing stop when an exchange closes? Why wait two days for a trade to settle when it can settle instantly? We do not believe these questions have good answers, and increasingly, neither does the rest of the industry.
We will not pretend the hard problems are solved. Legal enforceability, interoperability, custody, and secondary-market liquidity remain tricky. But they are no longer treated as existential barriers; more as engineering and legal-design problems to be worked through, and problems with known shapes get solved.
We expect the second half of 2026 to be our most active period ever for new listings. By the end of the year, we expect to have listed several firsts for the platform: public equity, ETFs, funds, and private equity. We have also improved the platform itself, streamlining onboarding, giving issuers better visibility and control over their issuances, and creating more utility around the assets listed with us.
Our journey started in Astana, Kazakhstan and, as Bitcoiners, we were later drawn to El Salvador and President Bukele’s efforts to modernise capital markets in Latin America. We continue to look for Bitcoin, STO, and RWA-friendly jurisdictions, and we aim to expand our reach further over the next six months.
The combination of market growth and changing institutional attitudes creates a strong tailwind for platforms that prioritise compliance, transparency and a great user experience. We have been in this market from the beginning, and continue to lead the way. Five years in, our conviction is unchanged: the freedom to transact is worth building for and global distribution is the reward.
Yours,
Jesse Knutson
Head of Operations, Bitfinex Securities
