Article by: Gino Mato
Compiled by Saoirse, Foresight News
Securitize reports its first quarterly earnings post-listing: the platform's average assets under management for tokenized assets reach a record high of $4.3 billion, up 16% year-over-year; platform trading volume surges 147% to $5.3 billion.
However, the company's total revenue declined 5% year-over-year to $14.4 million; tokenization revenue decreased approximately 12% to $7.8 million; and adjusted EBITDA turned negative at a loss of $5.5 million.
Compared to the same period last year, the company moved more assets on-chain and processed a significantly larger volume of business, but earned less money.
The CFO explains the discrepancy between scale and revenue
Securitize's Chief Financial Officer, Francisco Flores, stated on the earnings call that revenue generated from assets under management is currently negligible, and the vast majority of platform trading volume has not yet been monetized.
He added that most of the revenue from tokenization business still comes from projects such as integrating new protocols and expanding the business network.
Asset service revenue, which consists of fees charged for managing the platform’s existing funds, performed significantly better, rising slightly by 3% year-over-year to $6.6 million. Flores stated that transaction monetization represents a medium- to long-term opportunity, and the current business model is not yet capturing this potential revenue.
Pre-IPO materials from Securitize projected that the company could achieve total revenue of $110 million and EBITDA of $32 million by 2026. Management stated that $85 million of this revenue is contractually secured, recurring, or supported by existing asset scale and partnerships, making the original projections highly achievable.
The management has now lowered the full-year revenue guidance to $70 million to $80 million. The company's total revenue for the first half of the year was $33.9 million. To reach the lower end of the guidance, the company needs to generate approximately $18 million in revenue each quarter in the second half; to achieve the upper end, quarterly revenue must approach $23 million.
To achieve the initial $110 million target, quarterly revenue would need to reach $38 million, more than 2.6 times the current quarter's revenue level.
Why is there a significant discrepancy between the scale of tokenized assets and revenue?
Edwin Mata, CEO of the tokenization platform Brickken, said that the contradictions exposed in Securitize’s financial report reflect a structural challenge facing the entire industry.
He noted that the assets under management in tokenized assets can continue to grow, but the underlying business monetization model struggles to scale in tandem; simply putting more assets on-chain does not automatically generate a business model that can grow proportionally.
Mata explained that currently, tokenization implementations largely rely on large-scale customized projects, dedicated system integrations, compliance with different jurisdictions, and the provision of extensive professional services for each new asset issuance.
Each new asset class, entry into a new jurisdiction, or product launch often equates to launching an entirely new implementation project. When revenue depends on customizing implementation on a project-by-project basis, the expansion rate of tokenized assets will far outpace the recurring income they can generate.
Mata believes that the truly massive business opportunities arise after assets are tokenized, not during the issuance phase. Companies need a long-term infrastructure to manage financial products, encompassing full capabilities such as access control, compliance reviews, data reporting, profit distribution, corporate action handling, and secondary market transfers.
This is the difference between implementation revenue and infrastructure revenue: implementation revenue is a one-time fee charged for deploying assets onto the blockchain, while infrastructure revenue is an ongoing fee generated by maintaining the continuous operation of those assets on the chain.
In his view, for the tokenization industry to capture infrastructure revenue, it must align with enterprise software: building standardized infrastructure, creating reusable workflows, and establishing a system that supports multiple financial products and complies with multiple jurisdictions.
Complex business architectures still require consulting and professional services, but the core profit logic must be embedded within the infrastructure itself.
Why simply calculating platform fees can lead to misjudgment
Utkarsh Ahuja, Founder and Managing Partner of Moon Pursuit Capital, believes that Securitize’s earnings report serves as a sobering reminder: the pace of industry adoption has not kept pace with commercialization.
He posed these questions to investors: As AUM and trading volume continue to expand, what happens on the business side? How much of this growth can be converted into sustainable revenue? Can profit margins improve? Will operational efficiency increase as the business scales up?
Ahuja stated that the tokenization industry is entering a phase of rational development. Over the past few years, the market has confirmed that institutions are indeed willing to tokenize real-world assets; now, the business models supporting this sector are being put to the test.
As more institutional capital flows into tokenized assets, investors will place greater emphasis on revenue quality, customer retention, profit margins, and the long-term commercial returns of asset operations. This is also the key to distinguishing whether a platform is a genuine, sustainable business or merely telling a growth story.
Dividing Securitize's $14.4 million in revenue by its $5.3 billion in trading volume may appear to yield a reasonable platform fee rate, but this calculation completely fails to reflect the company's actual profitability.
Securitize's reported trading volume encompasses a broad range of activities, including investments, redemptions, dividends, and cross-chain asset transfers; CFO Flores also acknowledged that only a minimal portion of this volume generates revenue.
A more realistic conclusion is that Securitize has yet to establish a mature "platform activity-revenue sharing" model—a fact that matters far more than any single fee rate.
How will the scale-revenue contradiction in tokenized assets evolve further?
Bullish scenario: Securitize is advancing its tokenized public equity business by leveraging issuer tokenization of shares, brokerage capabilities, and atomic settlement to enable high-frequency trading and generate transaction fees. Management believes that tokenized equities have stronger trading characteristics compared to tokenized government bonds or credit products. However, this business represents a medium- to long-term strategic initiative and will not impact this year’s financial performance cycle.
To achieve annual revenue approaching or reaching $80 million, the company needs to generate approximately $23 million in revenue each quarter in the second half of the year, representing a significant acceleration compared to the current quarter.
Bearish scenario: While AUM and trading volume continue to hit new highs, the underlying business model still relies heavily on individual customized projects, tokenization revenue remains highly volatile, and asset service revenue growth is too slow to offset these issues.
If annual revenue merely reaches the lower end of the guidance at $70 million, only about $18 million in quarterly revenue would be required—slightly higher than this quarter. Even as publicly reported business scale continues to hit new highs, adjusted EBITDA could still remain in deficit.
The next major challenge for the tokenization industry: Can platforms generate sustainable revenue independently, without relying on new projects, when asset scales or trading volumes increase by billions?