Securitize’s new president, Brett Redfearn — the SEC’s former director of trading and markets who joined the firm in April — says tokenization could do more than give Wall Street a new playground. In an interview with Decrypt, he argued that putting real-world assets on-chain can flip the script for everyday investors by returning control to them and cutting out costly intermediaries.
Redfearn frames tokenization as a “Trojan Horse for consumers.” The core promise is disintermediation: when investors hold assets in digital form, they can participate in decentralized finance (DeFi) rails and access efficiencies that centralized systems usually keep to themselves. One clear target, he says, is the entrenched business of stock lending — a routine service major retail brokerages use to monetize idle customer shares by lending them to short-sellers.
Today, retail customers typically let brokers loan out their shares while most of the profit flows to the middlemen. The split varies: NerdWallet reports Robinhood retains roughly 85% of associated revenue from stock lending, while Charles Schwab splits revenue about 50/50 with customers. Redfearn believes tokenization changes the economics by enabling peer-to-peer and protocol-driven ways to put assets to work, bypassing centralized gatekeepers. “I think that business is totally disruptible,” he said. “There’s a lot of opportunities when you start to disintermediate traditional businesses.”
Securitize’s public debut is set to be a test of that thesis. On Thursday, the company’s shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ. Securitize has become a go-to infrastructure provider for tokenized securities — even helping large institutions like BlackRock issue securities directly on-chain — and the listing will show whether Wall Street’s embrace of tokenization extends to the firms building the plumbing.
Redfearn was pragmatic about how the broader DeFi ecosystem will factor into Securitize’s growth: much of the innovation will come from unaffiliated builders. “I believe that the sky’s the limit in terms of what builders are going to be able to achieve that’s going to bring benefits for investors who are interested in participating in this sort of tokenized securities ecosystem,” he told Decrypt.
Signs of the industry moving in that direction are already emerging. Robinhood is expected to roll out new products this week, and Compass Point analyst Ed Engel has suggested tokenized equities compatible with DeFi could be among them — after the company experimented with tokenized shares for European customers last year. If major brokers start offering tokenized versions of equities, retail investors may finally see more direct economic participation in services — like stock lending — that historically enriched middlemen.
The bigger question is whether tokenization will meaningfully shift profits and control back to investors. Redfearn is betting that combining on-chain securities with DeFi primitives and open innovation will create alternative paths for income generation and liquidity that don’t rely on the traditional gatekeepers. For retail investors, that could mean a future where their holdings are not just parked but actively and more transparently earning for them.
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