Galaxy Digital Shakes Up TradFi: Tokenized Shares Launch on Solana Blockchain
Wall Street meets Web3 as Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital bridges the gap—tokenizing its own equity on Solana's high-speed rails.
Why it matters: Traditional finance just got a blockchain bypass. Galaxy's move signals institutional crypto isn't coming—it's already here, just wearing a tokenized disguise.
The fine print: While bankers clutch their pearls over 'regulation,' Solana's 65,000 TPS handles the paperwork in microseconds. Your move, DTCC.
Bottom line: Another brick in the DeFi wall—or just a clever way to lure crypto natives into buying what amounts to a glorified stock certificate? (We see you, Galaxy.)
Galaxy Class A equities now part of RWA tokenization market
Superstate, which will serve as the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered transfer agent for the initiative, said the system will help investors to access traditional equities through the transparency and programmability of blockchain technology.
“We’re proud to be working with Superstate to help lay the groundwork for an onchain capital market that bridges traditional equities with next-generation infrastructure,” chief executive Novogratz said in a statement. “Our goal is a tokenized equity that brings the best of crypto – transparency, programmability, and composability, into the traditional world.”
Galaxy mulled the tokenization for its shares in mid-August, disclosing that it had engaged with Superstate to manage the process. Superstate sent a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force in April, proposing the creation of a framework to bring Wall Street stocks on-chain.
Wednesday’s announcement could be the launch of the entire project.
The capital market institution, valued at nearly $9 billion, first listed its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2018 before expanding to Nasdaq earlier this year. It is now part of a list of public companies whose stocks have been made available in tokenized form.
Platforms such as Backed Finance’s xStocks have already tokenized more than 60 publicly traded companies on Solana, BNB Chain, and Tron. Tokenized equities such as Netflix, Meta Platforms, and Nvidia are available on centralized exchanges, including Kraken and Bybit, as well as on decentralized exchanges built on Solana.
Yesterday, xStocks said it had expanded its tokenized equity offerings to Ethereum, broadening access to investors who use that blockchain.
Financial regulator happy with stock tokenization
The development comes as regulators globally are in discussions about how blockchain tokenization could be viable for financial markets.
Speaking at the FintechOn Summit in Taipei on Tuesday, Peter Kerstens, an adviser to the European Commission, said regulators should focus less on expanding the existing Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) law and more on enabling the tokenization of real-world assets.
Kerstens said the European Commission is preparing proposals in December as part of the Savings and Investment Union (SIU), an initiative to create a pan-European financial market.
“In building the Saving and Investment Union, we also want to exploit or make use of distributed ledger technology as far as we can,” Kerstens said.
He proposed that tokenization of financial instruments such as equities, debt, and derivatives should be the focus for regulators.
“Rather than trying to correct or improve MiCA, I think we should focus on something much bigger, much more important, which is the tokenization of financial instruments,” the adjunct Vanderbilt Law School professor reckoned. “Personally, I am convinced that the financial markets will end up being tokenized to a very large extent.”
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