Bullish Puts Stock Issuers in the Driver's Seat on Tokenization

Cunningham, a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, has taken the president's chair at Bullish and is steering its tokenization strategy toward the companies whose shares get tokenized. Her argument: issuers keep getting left out of the conversation. She has drawn a line between products that hand holders price exposure without shareholder rights and designs that protect those rights while letting issuers veto third-party tokenization. The OKX-ICE platform is one example of the latter, which puts the issuer at the center of how a token is built and how ownership gets recorded.

The vehicle for that vision is Equiniti, a UK-based transfer agent that keeps official shareholder records and processes ownership changes. Bullish plans to pay about $4.2 billion for the company. The deal still needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in January 2027. If it goes through, Bullish would absorb nearly 3,000 corporate issuer clients and more than 20 million shareholders.

Bullish has already run its own experiment. It tokenized its own shares on Solana this year, and at an October event at the NYSE it showed a transfer of 61 million shares reserved for tokenization and managed by Equiniti. The company has named Solana, Ethereum and Aptos as networks issuers could pick from.

Cunningham isn't sold on round-the-clock trading as the selling point that wins companies over. She has pointed instead to clearer visibility into who owns what, more direct lines to shareholders, faster settlement and lower administrative costs. She also said Bullish can build products under existing rules without waiting for the CLARITY Act.

Two things sit on the runway: regulatory sign-off for the Equiniti acquisition, and Bullish landing an issuer beyond itself.