TL;DR
- Bitfinex Securities surpassed $500 million in listed assets in September 2026 and aims to democratize access to capital for SMEs around the world.
- The real-world tokenized asset market is worth approximately $40 billion excluding stablecoins, with projections to reach trillions by 2030.
- Paolo Ardoino set a goal of reducing the cost of issuance and capital raising by 80% via tokenized markets over the next five years.
Bitfinex Securities published an analysis arguing that the dominant narrative around asset tokenization only solves half of the real problem. The usual narrative centers on the retail investor accessing fractions of large companies from any corner of the world, but the platform argues that the most urgent challenge is the opposite: connecting companies without access to capital markets to a global investor base.
The real-world tokenized asset market — excluding stablecoins — is approaching $40 billion, with projections placing it in the trillions by 2030. Bitfinex Securities, for its part, crossed the $500 million threshold in listed assets in September of this year, with an offering that includes private credit, Treasury bonds, commodities, fixed income, and public and private equity.
The Unsolved Problem of Tokenization
Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer of Bitfinex, defined tokenization as “a fancy way of saying we updated the transport layer for the same assets.” For Ardoino, without regulatory frameworks that broaden access to capital, the real impact is limited. The platform already offers 0% maker and taker fees, settlement in seconds, and issuance timelines of around 20 business days, compared to the months required through traditional channels.
Ardoino framed the problem as follows: an SME in a remote location that can only turn to its local bank, with no competition and no ability to negotiate the price of a loan. A global debt and equity market for small businesses would change that equation. At the other end of the spectrum, liquidity concentrates around a handful of names — SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic — and leaves no room for the rest.
Bitfinex: Regulation as a Starting Point
Bitfinex Securities’ services rely on jurisdictions that Ardoino described as cautious and investor-protective. The platform has operated within the fintech lab of the Astana International Financial Centre since 2021 and applied in September 2025 to become a full authorized investment exchange. In El Salvador, it received the first license under the Digital Asset Issuance Law in April 2023; the derivatives arm obtained its license in January 2025 and the spot exchange in May 2026.
Ardoino drew a comparison with the history of Tether: USDT took six years to reach meaningful scale, growing outside the traditional financial system. “Tether’s competitive advantage was built through fieldwork, effort, and persistence,” he noted.
The benchmark for measuring the model’s success in five years is: if the cost of issuance and capital raising does not fall 80% compared to traditional markets — where average fees hover around 7%, versus the platform’s current 4% — “we will not have done a good job. Not as Bitfinex, but as an industry.”
