Vertical Integration Squeezes Backed
Backed Finance
Vertical integration turns tokenization from a one time wrapping service into a full market stack, and that is where Securitize can squeeze Backed. Backed mainly earns when institutions issue or redeem bTokens, while trading and DeFi distribution happen through outside venues and partners. Securitize can package issuance, transfer compliance, fund administration, and secondary trading in one workflow, which makes it easier to win large fund launches and capture more fees per asset.
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Backed is deliberately asset light. A user comes to its dashboard, completes KYC, requests issuance, then Backed routes the real world trade through partners, mints the matching token, and later handles redemption in fiat or USDC. That keeps capital needs low, but it also means important parts of the product and economics sit with brokers, custodians, exchanges, and DeFi venues.
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Securitize has moved further toward the exchange model. It combines broker dealer and ATS infrastructure with tokenization and fund admin, and it is already the operating layer for BlackRock BUIDL and VanEck VBILL. That lets it offer issuers a more complete setup, including regulated trading rails, instead of just the token wrapper.
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The closest analogue is brokerage infrastructure. As embedded brokers like Alpaca and Apex moved from APIs into clearing and books and records, they kept more revenue and controlled more of the customer experience. Tokenization is starting to follow the same pattern. Control of issuance alone is less defensible than control of issuance plus trading plus settlement.
The market is likely to split in two. Large regulated issuers will cluster around full stack platforms that can launch a fund and support trading from day one, while firms like Backed will need to move upmarket into white label enterprise software and specialized multi chain distribution. In tokenized securities, the winning product is increasingly the whole pipe, not just the token mint.