On Jan. 27th 2020 Texas-based Vertalo officially announced a transition from Ethereum to Tezos citing a number of factors which have influenced the decision and which make Tezos more preferable for their purposes (among which transaction speed, network stability, reliability and security). The company specializes in on-chain assets management in the securities tokens industry and in November of 2019 Vertalo was confirmed registered with the SEC. Security tokens digitize tangible assets that are generally less liquid (e.g., real estate) and subject to much stricter regulations. Tezos appears to be getting a lot of traction in that particular area, having become the STO (security token offering) issuance platform of choice (with over $2.643 billion worth of STOs announced to take place on the protocol, it could be said that STOs are saturated on Tezos, among all protocols/chains).

The behavior of security tokens also has to do more with dynamics related to asset ownership rather than transaction mechanics. Earlier in 2018 leading securities tokenization company TokenSoft had proposed a token standard for security tokens, tokenized securities and other tokens carrying complex compliance requirements, the ERC-1404. The standard had been developed with corporate governance, banking and securities laws in mind. But increasingly there's preference for and migration to Tezos for such applications, Ethereum being somewhat poorly equipped and clumsier in dealing with those.

A good reason to prefer Tezos over Ethereum for applications such as these is Tezos' institutional-grade contracts which are written in an OCalm-derived DSL (domain-specific language) and are functional expressions which lend themselves to formal verification that proves the mathematical correctness of the code about to be deployed, ensuring that it executes as intended. Testing high-value transactions like that prior to publishing them on-chain provides greater confidence in the safety and security of the blockchain and is of crucial importance to mission critical operations. Additionally, formally verified multi-signature contracts allow for cold storage deployment and management for contracts. These are the main reasons why Tezos is as appealing to the more conservative businesses and financial institutions, the ones that usually can't afford to relax assumptions and where security is paramount.

Another property of Tezos which makes it appealing to such companies and businesses is its governance style which defines a formal process for stakeholders to more efficiently reach a Schelling point in retaining its network effects, avoiding the disputes, hard forks and fragmentation which have characterized other earlier chains in the past (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.) Regular protocol upgrades and refinement continuously take place through seasonal amendment cycles with voting on proposals, testing approved ones and implementing the final decisions. All of which makes investors and businesses confident in the protocol's reliability, being less concerned that the network may split or get bogged down by some dispute or other or due to some sudden critical vulnerability in some of its running applications.

On top of all that, Tezos is already a proof-of-stake chain and its architecture designed to be flexible and modular which makes it much easier to address some various potential concerns and arising issues along the way, regulatory and/or otherwise. Not least of all Tezos has grown its community and spawned a particular culture around it, growing its own flavor of DeFi which seems somewhat less "hobbyist" than Ethereum's and more pragmatic and goal oriented in what it aims to accomplish (and much less shy in manoeuvring in the world of high finance). This isn't surprising either, given the founders' background in finance and fintech (Arthur Breitman having worked in Goldman Sachs' high-frequency trading shop, for example).