This sounds bold and modern and “obviously the future.” And that’s exactly why I don’t fully trust it yet.
France saying it will run the world’s first fully onchain IPO on April 9 at the Lise stock exchange is the kind of headline that makes tech people clap and everyone else squint. The pitch is clean: put the IPO process on a blockchain, let smaller companies do something that normally feels built for giants, and cut the cost and mess of the old market plumbing. Public reporting says big, serious institutions are backing it, including BNP Paribas, CACEIS, and Bpifrance. So this isn’t some scrappy experiment in a garage. It’s a deliberate move by the grown-ups.
But here’s the tension: when you put “world’s first” next to “financial market,” you’re basically admitting you’re about to stress-test trust in public.
If this works, it’s not just a new way to list a company. It’s an attack on the idea that public markets need to be slow, expensive, and full of middlemen to be safe. That’s the real message underneath the PR. People have complained for years that the path to an IPO is too heavy for small and medium-sized companies. Too many steps, too many gatekeepers, too many fees, and too many rules that make sense for huge firms but crush smaller ones. The onchain promise is that you can keep the “real IPO” part—public investors, formal process—while ditching the parts that feel like legacy baggage.
I like the ambition. I also think “reducing cost and complexity” is usually where trouble hides.
Because complexity isn’t just there by accident. A lot of the so-called “legacy” stuff exists because markets are not forgiving. People lie. People misunderstand what they’re buying. Systems break. Mistakes happen at the worst times. The reason public markets became full of checks is that the simple version got abused. So when someone tells me they’ve made it simpler, my first thought is: simpler for who, and what protection did you trade away?
Imagine you’re a small French company that’s grown up enough to want public money. You don’t have a giant finance team. You don’t want a long roadshow and months of paperwork. An onchain IPO sounds like a door finally opening. If it actually lowers the barrier, that’s good. More companies get access to funding. More regular investors get access to growth earlier, not just the big funds. In theory, it spreads opportunity.
Now imagine you’re a normal person thinking about buying shares. You already feel like markets are a rigged game. You’ve heard “blockchain” used to sell everything from hope to scams. Even if this IPO is real and regulated and backed by major institutions, the average person won’t feel that nuance. They’ll just hear “onchain” and either assume it’s magic or assume it’s dangerous. Either reaction is a problem. A market built on hype is fragile. A market built on fear doesn’t grow.
The involvement of big institutions cuts both ways. On the positive side, it signals someone cares about the boring parts: custody, compliance, settlement, the stuff that keeps investors from getting wrecked when a password is lost or a system goes down. It says this isn’t “move fast and break things.” It’s closer to “move carefully and still change things.”
But it also raises a more uncomfortable interpretation: maybe this is less a revolution and more a rebranding. If the same powerful players run the new rails, is it really a cheaper and fairer system—or just a new product with the same old control? It’s very possible the “onchain” part is mostly infrastructure, while the actual experience and power dynamics stay basically the same. That might be fine! But let’s not pretend it automatically means democratization.
The real stakes are trust and spillover.
If this goes smoothly, other exchanges and regulators will feel pressure to follow. Not because they love innovation, but because nobody wants to look stuck in the past. If it becomes normal for SMEs to go public this way, it could reshape who gets to raise money and when. It could also force traditional markets to lower fees and speed up processes, which is a win for companies and investors.
If it goes badly—even in a small way—the damage could be outsized. A technical glitch, a confusing investor experience, a dispute about who owns what, or even just a messy first week of trading could become the story people remember. “Onchain IPO” turns into a punchline. The next ten serious projects get judged by the first one’s worst moment. That’s how public perception works. And finance is a confidence game, whether we admit it or not.
There’s also a quieter risk: if the process becomes so “easy” that weaker companies rush in, you could see a flood of low-quality listings. Not because blockchain causes that, but because lowering friction changes behavior. When it’s hard to go public, only the most prepared attempt it. When it gets easier, you get more shots on goal—and more missed shots too. Regular investors are usually the ones holding the bag when standards slip.
I don’t know yet whether this is a genuine leap forward or a carefully contained pilot that will never fully open the doors it claims to open. I want it to work, and I want smaller companies to have a real path to public funding without being crushed by cost. But I also don’t want “innovation” to become a cover for pushing risk onto people who are least able to judge it.
So here’s what I keep coming back to: if this onchain IPO succeeds, who is it really going to make richer and more powerful—small companies and everyday investors, or the same institutions that already control the system?