Fairmint Brings the Onchain Shareholder Record to Public Companies
Fairmint is taking its onchain shareholder record to public companies, extending a service it built for private cap tables to the official ownership files of listed firms. Announced on 28 October 2026, the offering lets a public issuer appoint Fairmint TA LLC, the company's SEC-registered transfer agent subsidiary (file no. 084-06901), to move its master securityholder file, the legal record of who owns the company, onto a blockchain and maintain it there as the authoritative version. Shareholders keep the rights they already hold, and each issuer authorises the move.
The timing is the story the announcement understates. Fairmint is reaching for public issuers weeks after US regulators opened a door that had been shut, and it is staking its position on the least glamorous layer of the market: the registry that records who owns what. That record, rather than the trading screen, is where the company argues the tokenisation contest will be settled.
What exactly is moving onchain?
The asset in question is the master securityholder file. In US equity markets, that file is the official register of ownership, maintained by the issuer or its transfer agent, and it governs who is legally recognised as a shareholder. Fairmint proposes to hold that register on a blockchain while connecting ownership and authorised transfers in a single system.
Once appointed, Fairmint reconciles the issuer's existing record, manages the handover from any incumbent transfer agent, and sets each company's rules for onboarding holders and processing transfers. The system is designed to record issuances, transfers, cancellations and transfer restrictions in the same place that holds the official record, which is the structural change Fairmint is selling: ownership and the rules that constrain it sit together rather than in reconciled silos.
Why is Fairmint doing this now?
Because the US regulatory path has shifted in its favour. SEC staff has set out how registered transfer agents can keep their official master securityholder files using distributed ledger technology, and on 17 September 2026 the Commission issued its Innovation Exemption, a five-year, conditional framework (Release No. 34-106402) that permits onchain trading of tokenised National Market System stocks on qualifying venues until September 2031. Crucially for Fairmint, the exemption requires that tokenised shares carry the same rights as the conventional security, which keeps the focus on genuine ownership rather than price exposure.
Fairmint has been building toward this since its 2019 founding by Joris Delanoue and Thibauld Favre, and surpassed 1 billion dollars in equity administered onchain for private companies in 2025. Chief executive Delanoue has framed the shareholder register as the decisive ground for tokenisation, arguing that whoever maintains the official record will shape how the market develops, and that the firm built regulated infrastructure and an open standard so that record could live onchain. The public-company offering combines that official record with the transfer-agent duties and controls required to support it.
How is this different from the tokenised stocks already trading?
The difference comes down to what the investor actually holds. Tokenised stocks can represent real shares, a claim on shares held by a custodian, or mere exposure to a price, and the three are not interchangeable. Fairmint's pitch turns on three questions for any token: what does the investor own, what rights come with it, and who keeps the official ownership record.
That distinction matters more as the market scales. The value of tokenised real-world assets passed roughly 30 billion dollars during 2026 on figures from RWA.xyz, much of it in the safest, shortest instruments. Fairmint's argument is that building equity onchain on a domestic foundation of issuer-authorised shares, registered transfer agents and an SEC now addressing how the record can live on a blockchain preserves investor protections and issuer control, where offshore copies and wrappers do not.
What does Fairmint bring to the table?
A standard and a network, alongside the registration. Fairmint created the Open Cap Table Protocol, an open framework for recording equity events and sharing permissioned ownership data, which runs on the Canton Network, a privacy-oriented blockchain built for regulated institutions. The firm is a governing member of the Open Cap Table Coalition, the body that stewards the open cap-table standard across the industry. Combined with its SEC transfer-agent registration, that gives Fairmint a claim to operate the official record itself rather than sit alongside it.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
For investors and issuers, the practical question is not whether equity moves onchain but who controls the register when it does. Transfer-agent appointments are sticky, and the firm that holds a listed company's master securityholder file sits at the centre of dividends, corporate actions and secondary transfers. Fairmint is positioning to own that layer under a US regulatory regime that is still provisional, with the Innovation Exemption written as a five-year experiment rather than a settled rule.
For finance professionals watching capital-markets infrastructure, the names to track are the ones competing to be the system of record, because that is where switching costs and durable revenue accumulate.
