Bullish’s $4.2 Billion Equiniti Deal Puts Transfer Agent Layer at Center of Stock Tokenization Race

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Bullish, the owner of CoinDesk, announced a $4.2 billion acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti last week, targeting the shareholder recordkeeping infrastructure that Farley says is essential to issuing blockchain-native securities rather than digital tokens that merely mirror traditional shares.  

Bullish CEO Says Most Tokenized Equities Are Synthetic Products, Not Blockchain-Native Securities

Speaking on Bullish’s earnings call Thursday, CEO Tom Farley said most of today’s tokenized equity market consists of synthetic products that reflect the price of traditional shares held elsewhere, rather than legally recognized securities recorded directly on a company’s books. 

Farley argued that controlling the transfer agent layer would allow tokenized shares to be issued directly into shareholder records from the outset. He said that structure would give issuers significantly more visibility into their own ownership base. 

“If you go talk to the investor relations and the chief finance officers of public companies, which I’ve done most of my career, frankly, the number one thing they will tell you is they’re in the dark.” 

Farley said on the call, adding: 

“The nested infrastructure that’s built up in this country over 200 years means that they get very, very little information. We live it as a public company. It’s almost comical how little information we get about our own shareholders. So, the tokenization, the promise of more information, is very, very compelling.” 

Farley also said tokenized equities would give investors in regions such as Asia greater flexibility to trade U.S. securities during hours when traditional markets are closed.

FTSE Russell and Index Providers Face Unresolved Questions on Float, Custody, and Market Cap Calculations

For index providers, the questions raised by tokenized equities are already active rather than hypothetical. Kristine Mierzwa, head of digital assets at FTSE Russell, told CoinDesk that tokenized shares are forcing conversations around how markets calculate liquidity, market capitalization, and index inclusion, saying:

“As you’re seeing companies like Galaxy issue shares that were tokens, how do you account for those in the full market cap?” Do those shares go into full float?” 

Mierzwa noted that many traditional asset managers currently cannot directly custody tokenized securities, and that some of FTSE Russell’s advisory committees therefore favor excluding such shares from official calculations, saying, “If those shares are not something a large asset manager can custody today, then they would not want us to consider them in the calculations.”  

Mierzwa added that the position is likely to shift as custodians accelerate blockchain adoption. “I think we’re going to move to a point where every custodian is going to be custodying tokens,” she said.

Canton Strategic Holdings CEO Says Collateral Mobility Is the Largest Efficiency Gain From Tokenized Settlement 

Mark Wendland, CEO of Canton Strategic Holdings, told CoinDesk the most significant opportunity in tokenized securities may be collateral efficiency rather than extended trading hours. Under current market structure, moving securities and collateral between brokers, clearinghouses, and counterparties can take one to two days even after a trade is completed. 

Wendland said blockchain settlement could compress much of that process into near real-time. “If collateral normally moves on a T+1 or T+2 basis and now it’s moving more real-time, the throughput of that collateral mobility is much faster,” he said. 

Wendland also referenced recent SEC guidance indicating that tokenized securities should be treated similarly to traditional securities under capital rules, and said that framing shapes how the infrastructure is being built. “A security is a security,” he said.

Tokenized Shares Trading on Weekends and in Multiple Versions Raise Pricing Questions for Index Providers 

Tokenization introduces market structure complications with no direct precedent in traditional finance. Mierzwa raised the example of tokenized Apple shares trading over a weekend at a price that diverges from Nasdaq’s Monday open, creating ambiguity over where true price discovery occurred. “But it will be interesting to see where the price discovery is coming from,” she said. 

The problem deepens if multiple tokenized versions of the same stock trade simultaneously with different dividend rights or settlement infrastructure. “The pricing and the liquidity could be different,” Mierzwa said.