According to Fairmint CEO and co-founder Joris Delanoue, the rapidly growing sector of tokenized stocks is at risk of repeating a historical infrastructure failure similar to Wall Street's 1960s paper crisis.
During the late 1960s, daily trading volumes on the New York Stock Exchange surged from approximately 5 million shares to over 12 million. The existing back-office infrastructure collapsed under the volume, leading to cascading settlement failures and the closure of multiple brokerages. The crisis was ultimately resolved with the creation of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.
Delanoue argues that today's private equity markets suffer from similar structural ailments, including fragmentation, illiquidity, and a heavy reliance on centralized intermediaries unsuited for high-throughput digital transactions. He cautions that if issuers tokenize equity while continuing to rely on outdated cap table management, manual compliance checks, and off-chain settlement, the new system will inherit the weaknesses of traditional models without capturing blockchain efficiencies.
Fairmint operates as an SEC-registered transfer agent that maintains official ownership records natively on a blockchain rather than through parallel off-chain ledgers. Its core product, the Open Cap Table Protocol, has administered more than $1.6 billion in equity value across more than 180 issuers and funds on the Canton Network.
In December 2025, Delanoue was elected General Director of the Canton Foundation, joining leadership ranks that include representatives from institutions such as DTCC and HSBC.
With 1960s trading volumes doubling before breaking the market infrastructure, Fairmint's approach is built on native on-chain solutions where equity representation, compliance logic, and ownership records operate on the same programmable layer.
