Tokenized Stocks Add Another Institutional Market Infrastructure at Scale
Equiniti, Alpaca, Bullish, Apex Fintech Solutions and DriveWealth have formed the Issuer Sponsored Token Coalition, bringing together transfer agency, brokerage, clearing, trading and distribution infrastructure to build the next generation of tokenized public equities.
The scale of the tokenized stocks market infrastructure involved is significant.
Equiniti is the UK’s leading share registrar and the No.2 transfer agent in the US. It supports 48% of the FTSE 100 and 35% of the S&P 500.
That matters because transfer agents sit at one of the most important control points in the equity market: the authoritative shareholder register.
➡️ Market evolution
Much of the first wave of tokenized equities has focused on creating an onchain representation of an existing share, often with the underlying security held elsewhere.
The issuer-sponsored model brings the issuer and its transfer agent directly into the architecture. This is the model SEC exemption gave a regulatory compliant way to scale recently.
The tokenized security is connected to the issuer’s authoritative shareholder register, preserving actual ownership rights, voting rights, dividends and corporate-action entitlements while enabling blockchain-based trading and settlement.
Equiniti is particularly important here.
Its existing tokenization architecture keeps the shareholder register as the legal record of ownership while allowing shares to be digitally represented and transferred using blockchain infrastructure, with digital assets and traditional share records reconciled in real time.
Combine that with:
1️⃣ Alpaca providing brokerage and interoperability between traditional and tokenized securities through its Instant Tokenization Network
2️⃣ Apex Fintech Solutions providing clearing and broker-dealer infrastructure
3️⃣ DriveWealth providing brokerage infrastructure and global distribution
4️⃣ Bullish, which is in the middle of completing Equiniti acquistion, bringing blockchain-native trading and market infrastructure
And we begin to get something much closer to an institutional tokenized-equity stack:
Issuer → Transfer Agent → Tokenization → Clearing/Brokerage → Trading → Distribution
→ Investor
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