Fairmint CEO Joris Delanoue is warning that crypto's tokenized-stock boom risks reproducing, in digital form, the exact failure mode that nearly broke Wall Street's settlement system more than half a century ago — not because too many people want to trade, but because the infrastructure underneath the trading can't keep up.
"The 1960s crisis wasn't caused by too many people wanting to trade," Delanoue said. "It was caused by systems that couldn't keep up with the people who wanted to trade." In the late 1960s, daily trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange roughly doubled from about 5 million to more than 12 million shares, overwhelming back offices still processing paper share certificates by hand. Settlement failures piled up, shares went missing, and the NYSE closed on Wednesdays for part of 1968 just to let firms catch up — a breakdown that ultimately forced the creation of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.
Distribution Is Outrunning Ownership Records
Delanoue's argument is that today's tokenized-equity platforms are solving a real, legitimate problem — giving more investors access to private company shares — but are moving far faster on distribution than on the harder work of building accurate, interoperable ownership records. If tokenization ends up being cosmetic, a blockchain wrapper around the same manual compliance checks and off-chain settlement rails that already exist, it risks creating new points of fragmentation rather than fixing the old ones.
That risk is compounded by competing platforms building closed, proprietary systems for recording who owns what. Delanoue argues that interoperability, not the number of exchanges racing to list tokenized shares, will determine whether onchain equities become durable financial infrastructure or just a faster way to generate the same reconciliation problems that plagued Wall Street in 1968.
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Fairmint's Bet on an Onchain Transfer Agent
Fairmint positions itself as a test case for the alternative: the company operates as an SEC-registered transfer agent that treats the blockchain itself as the authoritative shareholder record, rather than maintaining a blockchain ledger alongside a separate off-chain one. Its Open Cap Table Protocol has administered more than $1.6 billion in equity value across upwards of 180 issuers and funds, running on the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled blockchain built for institutional use.
Delanoue's own position in that ecosystem expanded in December 2025, when Fairmint announced his election as General Director of the Canton Foundation, seating him on the board alongside representatives from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Euroclear, HSBC, Digital Asset and Broadridge — pairing a fintech founder directly with the institution that was itself created to fix the last paper crisis, and with banks that have their own stake in how tokenized securities settle.
Why the Comparison Matters Now
The stakes of getting this right are rising alongside the volume of tokenized private-market activity. Just as SpaceX's own newly public stock has spent August absorbing hundreds of millions of insider shares unlocking onto the market, tokenized-equity platforms are racing to onboard private companies at a pace that will eventually test whether their settlement and record-keeping infrastructure can actually absorb the volume — the same test Wall Street failed, on paper, in 1968.
