The alliance, jointly initiated by Bullish and global renowned securities registrar Equiniti (EQ), has attracted clearing and brokerage giants including Apex Fintech Solutions, Alpaca, and DriveWealth. By pioneering a new paradigm of "issuer-authorized on-chain issuance directly connected to authoritative shareholder registries," the coalition fully preserves on-chain investors’ voting rights and dividend entitlements, fundamentally ending the chaotic proliferation of third-party synthetic tokens and ushering in a new era of trillion-dollar compliant tokenization of U.S. equities.

Establishment of the Main Force: Three Heavyweight Institutions Join the Full-Stack Tokenization Coalition

At this critical juncture where real-world assets (RWA) are accelerating integration with traditional financial infrastructure, the "Issuer-Sponsored Token Coalition" — launched by institutional-grade compliant crypto trading platform Bullish — has achieved pivotal expansion. On October 27, Bullish officially announced that Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), a leading global quantitative hedge fund and market maker, Vertalo, a pioneer in digital securities transfer agent technology, and Zero Hash, a B2B crypto and stablecoin infrastructure platform, have formally joined the coalition.

The coalition was originally co-founded on September 24 by Bullish and Equiniti (EQ), a century-old global leader in shareholder registry management and transfer agency services. Its initial founding members already include major players from Wall Street’s retail brokerage and clearing infrastructure, such as the prominent securities clearing firm Apex Fintech Solutions, developer-focused brokerage API platform Alpaca, and embedded investing giant DriveWealth.

With the addition of Qube, Vertalo, and Zero Hash, the coalition has now completed its full lifecycle puzzle—from "legal shareholder registration" and "custody and clearing backbone" to "quantitative high-frequency market-making liquidity" and "front-end broker distribution." As an open, non-exclusive industry organization, the coalition aims to break down fragmented silos and collaboratively establish a unified technical standard for tokenized securities that ensures both technical interoperability and legal certainty.

New Paradigm of Issuer Sponsorship: How to Resolve "Shadow Tokens" and Intellectual Property Disputes?

The recent expansion of the coalition has sparked strong resonance across Wall Street and the crypto industry, precisely because it targets the most pressing pain point in current U.S. equity tokenization. Just recently, The Wall Street Journal published a full-page warning advertisement funded by conservative institutions, directly accusing unregulated crypto venues of privately packaging public company stocks into "shadow tokens," prompting a joint letter of opposition from 22 multinational corporations—including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and Alphabet—submitted to regulatory authorities.

The root cause of traditional public companies’ strong resistance to early-stage stock tokenization lies in the unauthorized use of “synthetic wrappers” by third-party platforms. These platforms issue certificates unilaterally without corporate consent, resulting in on-chain investors lacking genuine statutory shareholder status. They are denied corporate governance voting rights, cannot receive direct dividend distributions, and face multiple risks including pricing discrepancies, anti-money laundering vulnerabilities, and potential systemic run risks.

The introduction of "Issuer-Sponsored Tokens" completely reverses this passive adversarial dynamic. Under this model, asset onboarding onto the blockchain is no longer a one-sided fantasy or gray-market arbitrage by crypto platforms but a formal financing and circulation process actively authorized, participated in, and endorsed by the issuing corporation. By proactively choosing to extend their equity assets to distributed ledgers, issuers legally eliminate the compliance liability inherent in “shadow stocks.”

Direct Connection to Authoritative Shareholder Registries: Voting Rights, Dividends, and Regulatory Compliance as One

How can on-chain token holders be ensured identical statutory rights to traditional shareholders? The answer lies in the coalition’s direct integration with the underlying “authoritative shareholder registry” (Cap Table). As a century-old service provider managing official shareholder records for thousands of global public companies, Equiniti and Vertalo—specializing in digital asset equity mapping—have achieved seamless real-time synchronization between blockchain smart contracts and traditional central securities depositories.

This means that regardless of whether investors hold paper shares through conventional brokerage accounts or compliant on-chain wallets holding authorized tokenized stocks, their identities are instantly reflected in the company’s official shareholder registry. Investor proxy voting rights, automatic dividend distribution, and corporate actions such as mergers and acquisitions are automatically executed via smart contracts integrated with transfer agent systems, eliminating information silos and intermediary rent-seeking.

This architecture perfectly aligns with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) latest regulatory framework. In September this year, the SEC explicitly introduced an "Innovation Exemption" framework for tokenized securities, stipulating that the core prerequisite for compliant on-chain trading of U.S. equities is that trading venues must rigorously verify that on-chain token holders possess the same full set of rights as traditional shareholders. The emergence of the issuer-sponsored model provides a mature, implementable solution at both institutional and technical levels to meet this regulatory requirement.

Wall Street Embraces the Deep Waters of RWA: Institutional Breakthrough for Trillion-Dollar Real-World Asset Tokenization

With deep involvement from established institutions such as Bullish—led by Tom Farley, former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange—as well as clearing powerhouse Apex and top-tier quantitative firm Qube, U.S. equity tokenization is transitioning from niche experimentation to the deep waters of the trillion-dollar capital markets. This shift not only grants global investors uninterrupted 7x24 access to core U.S. equity assets, but also delivers a qualitative leap in efficiency for atomic settlement (T+0) and collateral circulation.

By connecting decentralized broker distribution networks (e.g., Alpaca, DriveWealth) with robust institutional order books (e.g., Bullish, Qube) through a unified token standard, the coalition dismantles the previously closed liquidity islands of traditional exchanges. Public companies can now expand their investor base to younger generations in emerging global markets, while avoiding reputational damage or malicious manipulation of their equity in gray markets.

The rapid growth of the Issuer-Sponsored Token Coalition demonstrates that the wave of real-world asset tokenization is not a crude disruption of the traditional financial system, but rather a profound institutional reengineering forged in partnership with legacy financial powerhouses. When the custody agents representing Wall Street’s legal orthodoxy stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the matching systems representing Web3’s elite liquidity, a new global capital market paradigm—one truly compliant, efficient, and seamlessly interconnected—is rapidly taking shape.

Author: DeepChao TechFlow