Dinari, a San Mateo, California-based startup that converts publicly traded shares into blockchain tokens, announced on Tuesday that it is putting the entire S&P 500 on-chain and making those tokenized stocks available to U.S. investors for the first time.

The company, founded by alumni of Stripe and Apple, has partnered with stablecoin issuer Circle to enable U.S. investors to buy and sell stocks through self-custody wallets. Under Dinari's model, users can fund accounts instantly using USDC, replacing the traditional brokerage infrastructure with a wallet-based system.

"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.

Circle declined to comment, citing a quiet period ahead of its upcoming earnings report.

Dinari stated that it aims to serve as a bridge between the $300 billion stablecoin market and the more than $60 trillion U.S. equities market.

The announcement comes amid a broader industry push toward tokenizing traditional securities. According to a recent report by venture capital firm a16z crypto, the market capitalization of tokenized stocks grew approximately 600% to roughly $1.7 billion by the end of June. Major financial institutions have also moved into the space, with BlackRock launching BUIDL, a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, in 2024. While other firms in the sector — such as Securitize and Figure — have established tokenized offerings, they typically focus on niche or private assets. Otte said Dinari differentiates itself by providing broader access to U.S. equities.

Under Dinari's system, users hold tokenized shares called "dShares," each directly linked to an underlying security held in regulated custody. The tokens preserve traditional shareholder rights, including voting and native USDC dividends. Because transactions settle on blockchain rails, trades can clear instantly — a contrast with the conventional U.S. equity market, which operates on a T+1 settlement cycle following a transition from T+2 that took effect in May 2024. Portfolios can move across supported platforms rather than remaining locked with a single broker. While the U.S. launch is new, the platform is already operational in 85 jurisdictions and supports 6,139 active tokens.

Origins in Frustration with Opaque Markets

The concept for Dinari emerged from Otte's view that traditional wealth management and capital market systems were "completely broken" and "opaque" — a realization he came to almost by chance.

Before founding Dinari, Otte worked as a software engineer at Apple and later pursued graduate studies in computational biology and genomics. He left his program to launch Freenome, a cancer diagnostics company that is now publicly listed on Nasdaq.

After achieving success with Freenome, Otte began working with wealth management services and found them "fairly opaque." He said he frequently did not know what his wealth managers were earning or how his money was being deployed, receiving little information beyond annual reports. Through that experience, he concluded 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 (DTCC), the centralized digital depository for nearly all stocks owned in the United States, which he described as a "black box" co-owned by major banks. He argued that the current system constrains investor mobility, making it difficult to transfer holdings between brokerages and effectively locking users into specific platforms.

During what he described as a quasi-retirement following Freenome's success, Otte connected with his future cofounders through Silicon Valley networks: Chas Rampenthal, the legal architect behind online legal technology company LegalZoom, and Brandon Ooi, founder of anime streaming platform Crunchyroll and a former engineer at payments company Stripe.

The three cofounders launched Dinari in 2021. The company takes its name from "denarius," the principal silver coin of ancient Rome.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.