Dinari Just Put the Entire S&P 500 on the Blockchain
- Dinari opened trading on 724 tokenized U.S. stocks, including every S&P 500 company, to eligible American investors.
- Users fund and trade positions through self-custody wallets using Circle’s USDC instead of a traditional brokerage account.
- The tokens run on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and Avalanche, with Solana and Sei support coming soon.
Buying a share of the S&P 500 no longer requires a broker. Dinari, a tokenized-securities platform founded by Stripe and Apple alumni, opened its blockchain-based U.S. equities service to eligible domestic investors this week. This lets them buy and sell 724 tokenized stocks directly from a self-custody wallet using USDC.
How the Tokenized Shares Actually Work
Each tokenized share, which Dinari calls a dShare, is backed one-to-one by the underlying stock held at a regulated custodian. Holders keep the rights that come with owning the real security: voting power, corporate action participation, and cash dividends, paid out directly in USDC rather than added as more tokens.
The service runs through Dinari’s own broker-dealer and transfer-agent registration with the SEC, a structure the company says lets it operate the tokenized side legally rather than through an offshore workaround. Circle, Privy, Para, and Monaco are named as launch partners. Because settlement happens onchain, trades can clear in seconds instead of following the standard multi-day settlement cycle U.S. equities normally run on.
“One day, I’m predicting the token itself will be the trusted ledger of the stock, “Dinari CEO Gabriel Otte told Fortune in an interview tied to the launch.“The beauty of that is, then we truly own it.”
Why USDC Is the Whole Point
The mechanics matter less than what they replace. A conventional brokerage account requires wiring cash, waiting for it to settle, and trading only when markets are open. Dinari’s model lets a user fund an account instantly with USDC and hold the resulting shares in the same wallet they’d use for any other crypto asset, with no brokerage intermediary sitting between the two.
That pitch puts Dinari in a crowded and fast-moving field. Ondo Finance unveiled a competing SEC-aligned framework last month, built on BlackRock’s S&P 500 ETF, though it isn’t yet live for U.S. investors. Securitize has taken a different approach, arguing companies should eventually issue shares natively onchain rather than tokenizing an existing listing.
Citigroup has projected the broader tokenized-securities market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, a number that explains why multiple well-funded firms are racing toward the same idea from different angles.
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