Securitize is sending a message to the market: tokenized ownership isn’t a foreign experiment — it is a domestic business opportunity.
That message was amplified this week as the firm recruited a senior figure from PayPal to spearhead its legal direction.
Key Takeaways
Securitize hired former PayPal digital asset leader Jerome Roche as legal chief.
The firm claims tokenized securities can scale entirely within U.S. regulatory rules.
Its platform handles real equities on-chain using SEC-supervised market entities.
Jerome Roche, who previously helped engineer PayPal’s push into blockchain technology and oversaw work on its dollar-backed stablecoin, is now Securitize’s chief legal strategist. His background suggests the company wants someone who understands both regulation and the practical realities of launching digital financial products within established law.
Tokenized Stocks Aren’t “Offshore Products,” Securitize Argues
For years, critics assumed tokenized equity would remain largely outside the United States due to regulatory friction. Securitize says its live offerings prove that assumption wrong.
Rather than treating tokenization as an export product, the firm claims it already runs compliant U.S. market infrastructure — complete with a registered broker-dealer, transfer agent, and qualified fund administrator.
In its view, the technology isn’t meant to simulate financial assets, but to represent and manage the real ones on-chain.
Roche framed his arrival around a simple idea: financial ownership and settlement are still trapped in 20th-century systems. Distributed ledgers, he argues, give institutions the chance to unify record-keeping, settlement, and value transfer — something existing plumbing struggles to do.
But he also warned that innovation collapses without legal frameworks, emphasizing why Securitize is investing in regulatory credibility rather than ignoring it.
Two Continents, One Regulatory Strategy
The announcement comes just after the company secured European authorizations to act as an investment institution and settlement provider.
That dual-jurisdiction posture positions Securitize as one of the few players building regulated tokenized markets simultaneously in the U.S. and Europe — a contrast to firms that fled the U.S. to launch abroad.
The timing is notable. The SEC recently ended an investigation into Ondo Finance, one of the sector’s prominent tokenization players.
Ondo called the outcome a turning point that could accelerate domestic adoption — echoing Securitize’s long-held view that tokenized assets are poised to become a standard element of American capital markets.
What was once framed as regulatory exile is increasingly being interpreted as regulatory maturation — and Securitize is positioning itself as one of the winners of that shift.
