Onchain cap table

An onchain cap table records who owns a company’s shares, options or fund units on a distributed ledger instead of in spreadsheets or a traditional registry system. Issuances, transfers and cancellations are written as transactions, creating a time-stamped audit trail.

For the record to carry legal weight, corporate law and the transfer agent arrangement must recognize the ledger as the official register. Delaware amended its corporate law in 2017 to permit stock ledgers kept on distributed electronic networks, which opened the door for this model in the United States.

For issuers and allocators, an onchain cap table can reduce reconciliation errors, speed corporate actions and make secondary transfers easier to settle. Privacy, key management and integration with brokerage systems remain practical challenges. Example: a company issuing tokenized shares through a registered transfer agent can have each token transfer update its legal shareholder register automatically.