Fairmint CEO Joris Delanoue warns that fragmented ledgers across tokenized stock platforms risk recreating the 1960s settlement crisis that nearly collapsed Wall Street.
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Wall Street did not collapse in the late 1960s, but it came close. Trading volumes had grown far faster than the industry's ability to process physical share certificates. Clerks fell weeks behind. Securities went missing. Settlement failures piled up. The New York Stock Exchange closed every Wednesday for part of 1968 just to give firms time to catch up. The crisis forced the creation of centralized securities depositories and the Depository Trust Company, institutions that became the backbone of US post-trade infrastructure.
Joris Delanoue, CEO of on-chain securities infrastructure provider Fairmint, believes the tokenized stocks market is moving toward a similar breaking point. In an interview with CoinDesk, he said the industry is building distribution speed while leaving ownership record-keeping unresolved. "The main question today is whether we are recreating the paper crisis, but as a digital crisis," Delanoue told CoinDesk.
Fragmented Ledgers Create the Same Old Problem
The risk he identified is fragmentation. Exchanges, special-purpose vehicles (SPVs), token wrappers, and proprietary ledgers each maintain separate records of who owns what. As tokenized stock volumes grow across incompatible systems, those records could diverge in the same way paper certificates once did. The technology changes the medium. It does not automatically resolve the underlying coordination problem.
Delanoue drew a careful distinction between a token and the underlying asset it may represent. "A token is not equity, but equity can be a token," he said. "When equity is a token, this token has the same safeguards, guarantees and trust as you had in the previous system." His argument is that those safeguards are not embedded in the token itself. They must be deliberately built into the infrastructure that supports it.
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Standards Must Arrive Before Fragmentation Compounds
The 1960s crisis produced lasting solutions because the industry was forced to standardize across the entire market. Settlement rules, clearing systems, and custodial structures were aligned under a common framework. Delanoue's concern is that the tokenized securities market is accumulating incompatible systems faster than it is building the equivalent consensus. Each new platform that launches without shared standards makes the eventual reconciliation harder.
His warning is not directed at the technology itself. The argument is about sequencing: distribution has moved faster than the infrastructure beneath it, and if that gap does not close, the market risks building a structural problem that grows alongside it.
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