The Problem: Equity is Stuck in the Past
Most founders don’t care about putting their equity onchain. What they do care about is making equity easier to issue, manage, and transfer. Right now, that’s a nightmare. Private equity is slow, fragmented, and riddled with intermediaries. Public equity is efficient, but only accessible to the top companies in the world. The system is broken.
Early Attempts & Hard Lessons
Our first approach? Tokenizing equity. Seemed obvious at first. But we quickly hit a wall — every tokenized transaction still had to interface with the offchain world (cap table providers, lawyers, transfer agents). Instead of reducing friction, we were adding complexity.
Lesson learned: to truly bring equity onchain, everything needs to be onchain — issuers, investors, and most importantly, the cap table itself.
The Turning Point: Open Cap Table Coalition
Enter the Open Cap Table Coalition. This coalition, which regroups the top U.S. securities law firms (Gunderson, Cooley, Orrick…) and industry players (including Fairmint) came together to standardize cap table data. Think of it as the “open-source” moment for equity.
This shift opened the door for what we’re doing at Fairmint: taking this new, standardized format and porting it onchain. Now, instead of just tokenizing equity, we’re creating an immutable, transparent, and interoperable ledger of equity ownership onchain.
What This Changes
With cap tables fully onchain, we eliminate:
- Intermediaries -> Lower costs
- Manual processes -> Instant transactions
- Compliance headaches -> Automated tracking
Now, when an investor sends USDC to a startup on Fairmint, their equity is issued immediately — no lawyers, no paperwork, no friction.
The Vision: Onchain IPOs
Today, equity markets are binary — you’re either private (slow, expensive, inefficient) or public (complex, costly, exclusive). Onchain equity changes that.
By building new rails for equity to move and cutting out unnecessary middlemen, our goal is to make private markets a lot more efficient, while paving the way for faster, more efficient, and cheaper onchain IPOs. The infrastructure is finally ready: wallets, stablecoins, as well as fast and cost-effective blockchain are all in place.
Let’s Make 2025 The Year Equity Moved Onchain
Fairmint is building the rails — but infrastructure alone isn’t enough. If we want 2025 to be the year of onchain equity ownership, we need to make it the narrative — shifting the industry from financial nihilism and memecoins to real, transformative innovation.
We regularly post short videos and discussions on your favorite platforms, where we dive into the topics shaping the future of startups, equity, and capital markets.
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