Exclusive: Dinari, founded by Stripe and Apple alums, partners with Circle to offer tokenized stocks to U.S. investors
· Fortune
For decades, buying stocks has meant going through brokers, waiting for trades to settle, and limited trading when stock markets are closed. Dinari is trying to change that. On Tuesday, the San Mateo, CA-based company that turns publicly traded shares into tokens announced that is putting the entire S&P 500 on the blockchain, and making those tokenized stocks available to U.S. investors
“One day, I’m predicting… the token itself will be the trusted ledger of the stock. The beauty of that is, then we truly own it,” Dinari cofounder and CEO Gabriel Otte told Fortune.
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Dinari’s model replaces the traditional brokerage stack with a wallet-based system where users can fund accounts instantly with the stablecoin USDC. Dinari says the arrangement, which entails a partnership with stablecoin giant Circle, allows U.S. investors to buy and sell stocks via self-custody wallets for the first time.
The startup added that it is seeking to be a bridge between the $300 billion stablecoin market and the more than $60 trillion U.S. equities market.
Circle declined to comment, citing a quiet period ahead of its upcoming earnings report.
Dinari’s announcement aligns with a broader industry trend toward the tokenization of traditional securities. According to a recent report by venture firm a16z crypto, the market capitalization of tokenized stocks grew approximately 600% to roughly $1.7 billion by the end of June. While other firms in the sector, such as Securitize and Figure, have established tokenized offerings, they typically focus on niche or private assets. According to Otte, Dinari sets itself apart by the broader access it provides to U.S. stocks.
Under its system, users hold tokenized shares, or “dShares,” where each token is directly linked to an underlying security held in regulated custody, preserving traditional rights like voting and native USDC dividends. Because transactions run on blockchain rails, trades can settle instantly and portfolios can move across supported platforms rather than staying locked with a single broker. While the U.S. launch is new, the platform is already live in 85 jurisdictions and supports 6,139 active tokens.
Opaque capital markets
The idea of Dinari emerged from Otte’s realization that the traditional wealth management and capital market systems were “completely broken” and “opaque.” He stumbled upon that reality almost by chance.
Before Dinari, Otte was a software engineer at Apple and later studied computational biology and genomics in graduate school. However, he dropped out to found his first company Freenome, which focused on cancer diagnostics and is now a Nasdaq-listed public company.
After finding success with his first company, Otte began using wealth management services and found them to be “fairly opaque.” He noted that he often did not know what his wealth managers were making or exactly what they were doing with his money, receiving little information outside of yearly reports. There, he realized that capital markets are “not designed to be an even playing field” and that the “deck is stacked” against anyone who is not already wealthy.
Otte expressed particular frustration with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the company that serves as the centralized digital depository for almost all stocks owned in the United States, describing it as a “black box” co-owned by major banks. He also argued the current system limits investor mobility and access, making it difficult to transfer holdings between brokerages and locking users into specific platforms.
In quasi-retirement from Freenome’s success, Otte met his cofounders Chas Rampenthal, the creative legal mind behind online legal technology company LegalZoom, and Brandon Ooi, founder of billion-dollar anime streaming platform Crunchyroll and former engineer at payments platform Stripe, through Silicon Valley’s tight-knit networks.
The three co-founders launched Dinari in 2021, naming the company after “denarius,” the most important silver coin in ancient Rome.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com