Fairmint CEO warns tokenized stocks may repeat 1960s paper crisis

Wall Street almost drowned in paperwork once. In the late 1960s, daily trading volumes on the New York Stock Exchange surged from roughly 5 million shares to over 12 million, and the back-office infrastructure built for a quieter era simply collapsed under the weight. Settlement failures cascaded. Brokerages shuttered. It took the creation of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation to pull the industry back from the brink.

Now, according to Fairmint CEO and co-founder Joris Delanoue, the fast-growing world of tokenized stocks is flirting with a remarkably similar disaster.

The parallel Delanoue is drawing

Delanoue’s argument boils down to a structural mismatch. The 1960s crisis wasn’t caused by too many people wanting to trade. It was caused by systems that couldn’t keep up with the people who wanted to trade. Manual clearing processes, physical stock certificates, and fragmented record-keeping turned a boom into a bottleneck.

Today’s private equity markets, Delanoue contends, suffer from many of the same ailments: fragmentation, illiquidity, and heavy reliance on centralized intermediaries that weren’t designed for high-throughput digital transactions. The risk is that tokenization becomes a cosmetic upgrade rather than a structural one. If issuers tokenize equity but still rely on outdated cap table management, manual compliance checks, and off-chain settlement, the system inherits every weakness of the old model while gaining none of the efficiencies that blockchain was supposed to deliver.

What Fairmint is actually building

Fairmint positions itself as an answer to that problem. The company operates as what it describes as the first fully onchain-native SEC-registered transfer agent, meaning it handles the official record of who owns what, but does so natively on a blockchain rather than maintaining a parallel off-chain ledger.

Its core product, the Open Cap Table Protocol (OCP), has administered more than $1.6 billion in equity value across over 180 issuers and funds. The protocol runs on the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled blockchain designed for institutional financial applications.

Delanoue’s influence in this space recently expanded beyond Fairmint itself. In December 2025, he was elected General Director of the Canton Foundation, joining leadership ranks that include representatives from heavyweight institutions like DTCC and HSBC.

Why the timing matters

NYSE volumes didn’t increase by some unimaginable factor in the 1960s. They roughly doubled, going from 5 million to 12 million daily shares. That was enough to break everything. Infrastructure gaps compound fast once volume crosses a threshold, and by the time the problem is visible, it’s usually too late to fix it gracefully.

Fairmint’s bet is that native onchain solutions, ones where the equity representation, compliance logic, and ownership records all live on the same programmable layer, will outperform hybrid models that bolt blockchain onto traditional systems.