Johny Fernandez: When you buy a share of stock, somebody has to keep the record that says it’s yours. For decades, that record has lived on paper, then in back-office databases most investors never see. My guest wants to put it on the blockchain, not as a copy of the security, but as the security itself. His company has already taken two SEC-qualified offerings on chain, in health care and in real estate, and he says he isn’t waiting on Congress to build it. First, a look at the company. The road from an idea to the opening bell starts right now.
Wall Street is built on trillions of dollars in stocks, bonds, and other assets. But what if owning and trading those assets could become faster, easier, and more accessible? That’s the opportunity Pablo Peñaloza sees after a career in investment banking and multibillion-dollar deals. He’s now building T7X, with the mission to bring traditional securities onto the blockchain. It’s called tokenization, turning ownership of real-world assets into digital tokens. The potential: faster transactions, broader investor access, and new ways for companies to raise capital. But T7X is making a different bet. Instead of waiting for an entirely new rulebook, it’s building around existing U.S. securities laws. Now comes the real test. Can T7X turn tokenization from Wall Street hype into a scalable business, and can it compete with bigger players while navigating an uncertain regulatory future? From Startup to Stock Exchange, T7X founder and CEO Pablo Peñaloza is next.
Joining us now here on the floor is Pablo Peñaloza, founder, chairman, and CEO of T7X. Pablo, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s amazing to have you here.
Pablo Peñaloza: Thank you so much, Johny. A pleasure to be here.
Johny Fernandez: Let’s go ahead and start with the simple stuff. What is T7X, and what are you building in tokenized real-world assets?
Pablo Peñaloza: T7X is a layer of technology infrastructure that we’re trying to use to modernize capital formation. Our goal is to help companies get access to capital in a more efficient and more transparent way in general. The main goal has always been to expand access to capital for these startup companies.
Johny Fernandez: Most tokenization takes an asset that already exists and wraps it into a token. You issue the security on chain from the start. Why does that difference really matter?
Pablo Peñaloza: It matters because the rights associated with owning the security are embedded into the actual token itself. When you buy a wrapper, for example, that security lies somewhere else, and the rights associated with that security, whether it be the right to vote on a shareholder decision or the right to dividends, reside with the actual owner of record. In our case, we embedded those rights. All of the relationships between the investor and the company are tied up in our smart contract, and the token itself represents the security.
Johny Fernandez: There are a lot of conversations right now around platforms like Securitize and networks like Canton. What is the key difference and distinction in T7X’s model?
Pablo Peñaloza: Both Securitize and Canton have done a wonderful job bringing tokenization at an institutional level. Our model relies on a more comprehensive approach that guides the issuer from the native issuance of the security all the way through the record keeping, all the way through maintaining the infrastructure for the wallets that hold those securities. Eventually, once approved by the SEC and FINRA, we hope to create a secondary market where those securities can actually trade. So we offer the entire lifecycle of the security.
Johny Fernandez: Something interesting is that this space has drawn a lot of regulatory scrutiny. How do you think about compliance?
Pablo Peñaloza: Compliance for us is key. It’s not just an afterthought that we try to bolt on top of the technology we already built. We conceived the technology with compliance in mind. The entire offering was based on the existing U.S. securities regulatory framework, and the way we administer the records of those securities is through an SEC-registered transfer agent. Everything we’ve done fits within the existing framework and is fully compliant.
Johny Fernandez: I want to talk a little more about your subsidiary, T7 Equities. You just said it’s an SEC-registered transfer agent. For viewers who have never heard that term, walk us through it. What does that mean, and why does it matter on chain?
Pablo Peñaloza: An SEC-registered transfer agent is a legal entity that maintains the record of who owns what security at which point in time. It’s a legal record, meaning it cannot be altered or transferred or changed. This matters because it creates the rights of those shareholders and establishes the relationship between the shareholders and the company at that point in time. Another reason it really matters in our case is what we’ve been seeing with large stock exchanges and crypto exchanges, [unclear: “that may be high. And.”] When you have securities held in a wallet and there’s no transaction associated with it, those securities can be hacked and maybe taken away from those wallets. But when a registered transfer agent is involved, a transaction that has not been approved can be reversed. Those tokens can be burned and a new token can be issued. It creates a whole level of protection, not only in cybersecurity but also for the investor.
Johny Fernandez: I want to talk a little more about your first two deals. Like in the intro, we talked about a health care lender and a real estate bond offering. They’re both smaller, regular Reg A+ raises. Why start there?
Pablo Peñaloza: Reg A, since the JOBS Act, has expanded access to capital for small companies. The regulation now allows slightly larger companies that in the past may have looked to the traditional capital markets to look at an alternative. The capital markets in general have not been the friendliest to small companies. They’re susceptible to too many issues: a lack of analyst coverage, limited investor awareness, and so forth. They’re especially susceptible to pressures when it comes to shorting the stock, because there’s no liquidity underneath it. What we’ve seen is that companies that have looked into perhaps going public are looking at tokenization, and Reg A in particular, as a vehicle to achieve their capital raises, still within the regulatory framework but without necessarily going public.
Johny Fernandez: Every share of stock comes with a question: who owns it? In 1968, Wall Street nearly broke trying to answer that. Trading volume surged, and back offices drowned in paper stock certificates, so many that the New York Stock Exchange closed on Wednesdays just to catch up. The fix came in 1973 with the Depository Trust Company. Instead of shipping paper between firms, certificates stayed in one vault, and ownership moved by book entry. Now, 53 years later, its parent, DTCC, has switched on a service that puts securities on a blockchain. So the paper is gone, but [unclear: “the question isn’t who keeps the record, and can investors trust it?”; likely “the question remains”]. That is the bet Pablo Peñaloza is making with T7X. And we’re back with Pablo, the founder, chairman, and CEO of T7X. Pablo, we were diving in before the commercial break about your background. I think the question a lot of people have is, why is now the right time for real-world asset tokenization?
Pablo Peñaloza: The time is right now because for many decades, the technology associated with securities hasn’t really evolved. There are many processes that still lag behind the ability of the technology. Now we have the right technology in place and also the right regulatory environment. We’ve had the passage of the GENIUS Act, and there are even more things coming up from the SEC in terms of rules. The CFTC is also pushing some rules that are going to make it easier and more welcoming for innovators in the market to apply this new technology.
Johny Fernandez: I want to talk about the ideal user for T7X, on the issuer side and on the investor side. Walk us through who the ideal T7X user is.
Pablo Peñaloza: T7X serves both sides of the capital market. On the one side, we serve the issuers of securities. These are companies that need capital, that have proven their concept, that are already cash flowing and doing well, and that are looking to raise capital. On the other side, we’re also looking to create a marketplace for the investors participating in those offerings. Our goal is to serve the entire ecosystem.
Johny Fernandez: You’ve said that three or more offerings are filed and about 50 issuers are in the pipeline. How do you keep quality high as you scale?
Pablo Peñaloza: At this point, we’ve been really, really careful. There are a lot of companies looking to raise capital, but we have a standard and a very structured methodology that we apply to everybody. There are no friends. We just look at the individual deal on its own merits, and we let it stand or fall on that.
Johny Fernandez: You’re still operating inside today’s securities rules, but much of the market still sees the CLARITY Act as the real unlock, and obviously we saw what happened with the CLARITY Act in the early fall. It’s stalling pretty much through 2027. [unclear: “So what milestones do you miss”] and how does that change your path from one-off Reg A+ deals to a real platform?
Pablo Peñaloza: That’s a really good question. We didn’t build our entire business model hoping that new legislation will come into place. We built it based on the existing regulatory framework. I do believe that if the CLARITY Act passes, it will provide better guidelines from both the regulatory side, at the federal and the state level. It will make it easier, and it will also invite a lot of the institutional players and other investors that are sitting on the sidelines looking for that additional clarity. But our model in and of itself doesn’t suffer whether regulation passes or not.
Johny Fernandez: I want to go back to your background, because you spent your career in investment banking, M&A, and running banks. What did you see from the inside that made you want to rebuild the plumbing behind it?
Pablo Peñaloza: That’s kind of a personal question to me, and I like to share that story, if you don’t mind. As an early investor in a startup, I had the opportunity to see that company get to the point where they went public, and it was one of the highlights to see our CEO ring the bell on the Nasdaq floor. We thought at that point we had arrived. This was the most meaningful event for that company up until that point. But the reality, over the next couple of days, was that there was no liquidity. There was no investor coverage, no investor awareness, no analyst coverage. The stock came under pressure from some entities that began to short, and we saw the price deteriorate and deteriorate drastically. Watching from the sidelines, I could see that the fundamentals were there. The company was profitable, the company’s products were solid, there was demand for the product, and yet the capital markets failed to reflect that. Eventually, that led to the company suffering, because it ended up letting all the current management [unclear: “go”]. New management came in, and all the focus and resources were pushed towards supporting the stock rather than running the company. Investors like myself ended up losing a lot of the value we hoped to generate with that exit. Because of that experience, I had the angle to see that the new technology could have solved, or at least improved, a lot of the issues we had with the current capital markets for smaller companies going public. And that’s how T7X was born.
Johny Fernandez: It’s really interesting. Reflecting on your background, we’ve talked about that, we’ve talked about what you’re doing. The show is about the road from startup to stock exchange, and you’re building a new way for companies to raise money from the public. So in your world, what does T7X have to prove before it can ring the bell here?
Pablo Peñaloza: For T7X, we need to show the world that we’re an essential part of the modernized capital market and capital formation. I think we’re early, but we’ve proven our concept. We have the SEC’s issued approval, with its qualification of [unclear: “two Rodriguez”; likely two Reg A+ offerings], and that shows that the model is solid. We have companies raising capital using this modern tokenization. We have investors receiving their shares in tokenized format. But it’s just the concept. We would need to have a much larger share of the market in terms of tokenization, and I think we can get there over the next 3 to 5 years.
Johny Fernandez: That’s awesome. Best of luck to you. I know what you’re doing is obviously something that’s growing, and there’s a bright future ahead. I want to thank you so much for joining us this morning here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It’s a pleasure to have you.
Pablo Peñaloza: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you, Johny.
Johny Fernandez: No problem.
