Securitize says it will launch on-chain stocks within the next few months, aiming for deployment in the first quarter of 2026.

But the focus is not on the words 'on-chain', but on how it defines this matter. It emphasizes that what is issued on-chain is not a representation, not a price tracker, nor an IOU from some custodian, but rather real shares in a legal sense.

Stocks are directly issued on-chain, directly recorded in the company's capital structure table, and the token you receive represents complete shareholder rights, including dividends, voting, and legal identity.

In the past, the so-called tokenization of US stocks on-chain mostly addressed trading experience issues, rather than ownership issues. Once real shareholder rights are involved, it ultimately still needs to return to off-chain. The on-chain layer is more like a shadow asset rather than the entity itself.

What Securitize wants to do this time is precisely to remove that shadow. Instead of having stocks first and then creating an on-chain version, it defines the shares on-chain from the very beginning and seeks legal recognition of the on-chain records. This is not a technical challenge, but a systemic one, and precisely because it is difficult, no one has dared to truly push it forward.

If this can be successfully implemented, the changes it brings may be greater than many people imagine. Corporate financing, equity registration, dividend settlement, and governance voting can all be completed natively on-chain, and investors will no longer need to distinguish between on-chain assets and real assets, as the two have merged into one.

Of course, reality will not be so smooth. Regulatory coordination, judicial enforcement, and cross-market compliance will all be long-term projects. But at least, this time the direction is no longer to use crypto to package traditional finance, but to attempt to directly migrate the core rights of traditional finance onto the chain.

In the past, we often liked to say that code is law, but reality quickly proved that the code itself cannot support real-world rights. Now it feels more like entering another stage—where it is not code replacing law, but law beginning to actively adapt to code and recognize the state and records on-chain.

This transformation may be slow and restrained, but once completed, its impact on the system is irreversible. Because of this, Securitize's step is less about a new narrative and more about a truly significant advancement, deserving more sustained attention than those stories that rely on frequency to maintain presence.