Bullish and Equiniti bet tokenised stocks on the share register

Bullish and Equiniti have built their tokenised-stock coalition around the one party most tokenised equity products leave out: the company that issued the share. The Issuer Sponsored Token Coalition, announced on September 24, 2026, with Alpaca, Apex Fintech Solutions and DriveWealth as its first infrastructure participants, argues that a token should sit on the issuer’s official shareholder register rather than track a share held somewhere else. What makes this more than a standards club is who convened it: Bullish is paying $4.2 billion for Equiniti, the registrar that keeps those books, so the coalition’s central design choice runs through the business Bullish is buying.

What the coalition actually announced

According to the joint Bullish and Equiniti release, the group is a “multi-stakeholder industry working group” that will focus first on four areas: preserving issuer and shareholder rights, interoperability, adoption infrastructure covering issuance, transfer, settlement, custody and secondary trading, and a wider ecosystem of issuers, broker-dealers, exchanges, transfer agents, custodians and market makers. The work plan runs from smart-contract architecture reviews to pilots and policy engagement. Members will meet issuers at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on October 27.

The difference from the wrapper model is structural. In much of the tokenised equity on offer today, a broker holds real shares in an omnibus account and a separate entity mints tokens against them, so the holder gets economic exposure but no place on the register, and voting and corporate actions depend on the intermediary passing them through. TIS showed how that plays out when Monetae’s 70 tokenised US stocks turned out to sit in one Alpaca omnibus account. Under the issuer-sponsored model, the release says, tokens “can be directly connected to the issuer’s authoritative shareholder register,” so the corporate-actions and shareholder-rights burden moves back to the issuer and its registrar instead of resting on whoever minted the token.

Related:Canada’s Big Six tokenised deposit rail names no settlement asset

Who brings what

Equiniti is the load-bearing member. Its May 5, 2026 deal announcement describes a transfer agent serving nearly 3,000 issuer clients, 15,000 corporate clients and 20 million shareholders, processing $500 billion in annual payments. The acquisition is expected to close in January 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.

The three brokerage names cover distribution and conversion. Alpaca said it joined to help tokenised equities and their traditional counterparts “be converted through Alpaca’s Instant Tokenization Network,” in the words of Arush Sehgal, Head of Digital Assets at Alpaca. Apex, a clearing and broker-dealer infrastructure provider, framed its role as standards that “allow tokenized markets to scale responsibly,” per Travis McGhee, Global Head of Digital Markets. DriveWealth, which supplies US stock access to investing apps worldwide, was the bluntest. “Much of what’s marketed today as ‘tokenized equity’ isn’t equity at all. Investors think they own the share, and they don’t,” said Naureen Hassan, CEO of DriveWealth.

There is a tension worth noting. Alpaca is simultaneously the custodian behind omnibus-style products such as Monetae’s and a founding participant in a coalition built to move past them. The release’s interoperability pillar explicitly includes “wrapped-token models,” which suggests the aim is conversion between the two structures rather than retiring wrappers.

Why the SEC order raises the stakes

The timing follows the SEC’s September 17 order, which TIS covered in detail when the innovation exemption capped tokenised stocks at 75 and 250 symbols. Two conditions in the SEC’s release bear directly on this coalition: venues must verify that a tokenised stock gives holders “the same rights and privileges” as the traditional share, and a token minted by an unaffiliated third party needs written notice to the issuer and an opportunity to object. Both push leverage toward issuers and the registrars that act for them. A separate SEC proposal would let a distributed ledger serve as the share register outright.

What the announcement does not say

The release names no governance structure, no chair, no membership criteria and no voting process for standards. It names no blockchain, no token standard, no venue that will list the tokens and no issuer that has agreed to sponsor one. CoinDesk, which Bullish owns, reported no product launch either. Beyond October 27 there are no dates, no volume or asset figures, no regulatory approvals claimed and no stated jurisdiction, though every reference point is American. Participation is “non-binding” and does not require any member to “issue or list a security, provide liquidity or support any particular product.” Additional participants are promised “in the coming weeks.”

That makes this a positioning move rather than a market. The test is whether named issuers appear at or after the NYSE session, and whether a venue operating under the exemption, including rivals to Bullish, chooses registrar-linked tokens over the wrapped supply already in circulation, such as the xStocks trackers the LSE plans to list with Kraken’s parent. If issuers stay absent, the coalition remains a transfer agent’s sales pitch with brokerage endorsements attached.

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