Bullish (BLSH) has agreed to acquire Equiiniti, a transfer agent and shareholder services company, in a $4.25 billion deal that would integrate a critical piece of traditional market infrastructure into its digital assets platform, expanding its business into tokenized securities.
The transaction gives Bullish, the parent company of CoinDesk, a regulated transfer agent, a required function for public companies, alongside its existing tokenization, trading and market infrastructure capabilities.
Equiiniti maintains records for more than 2,500 companies and 20 million shareholders and processes approximately $500 billion in annual payments, effectively acting as a system of record for stock ownership.
Together, the companies aim to offer an end-to-end platform covering token design, issuance, compliance, registry and secondary trading, addressing what Bullish sees as a key gap in blockchain-based capital markets: the lack of a transfer agent designed for tokenized assets.
“Tokenization is a unique shift in the way capital markets work, the defining infrastructure trend for the next 25 years,” Tom Farley, CEO of Bullish, said in the release.
“Broad adoption at an institutional scale requires three things: end-to-end tokenization services, a single, unified ledger, and relationships with issuers at scale. This combination delivers all three, and I believe it uniquely positions us to lead the transition to tokenized securities,” he added.
The deal comes as traditional financial service providers continue to move into securities tokenization. Most recently, BlackRock-backed Securitize and Computershare announced plans to bring a portion of the $70 trillion U.S. stock market online via tokenized stocks, a move that brings traditional infrastructure closer to the blockchain rails.
Wave of mergers and acquisitions
Bullish’s acquisition of Equiniti is also part of a broader wave of consolidation sweeping crypto, as companies race to build comprehensive financial infrastructure.
After a lull in 2022-23, mergers and acquisitions rebounded strongly in 2025, with more than 260 deals totaling about $8.6 billion, according to Pitchbook data. This amount is approximately four times higher than the previous year, thanks to clearer regulations and renewed institutional interest.
Companies are increasingly using acquisitions to fill capacity gaps in areas such as custody, payments, tokenization and derivatives, while larger players absorb smaller companies to increase distribution and compliance. High-profile deals, from Kraken’s move into regulated derivatives to MoonPay’s push into payments infrastructure, underscore a shift away from speculative bets toward vertical integration and sustainable revenue models, a trend expected to continue through 2026.
The deal allows Bullish, which went public last year, to connect traditional equities infrastructure to blockchain rails, enabling features such as real-time cap table visibility, automated corporate actions and faster settlement, while supporting the liquidity of tokenized equities, particularly for non-US investors.
At $4.25 billion, the Equiniti acquisition would be among the largest crypto-related deals ever, surpassing Coinbase’s $2.9 billion purchase of Deribit and Kraken’s $1.5 billion NinjaTrader deal. This size highlights the extent to which crypto mergers and acquisitions have gone beyond purchasing exchanges and transformed into a land grab for regulated financial infrastructure.
Bullish’s last acquisition before the Equiniti deal was its 2023 purchase of CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, marking its entry into media, data and index services alongside its trading businesses. In 2024, it also acquired data provider CCData, a UK-regulated benchmark administrator and a leading provider of digital asset data and index solutions.
The Equiniti acquisition is expected to be completed in early 2027, pending regulatory approvals.
Goldman Sachs served as Bullish’s financial advisor, while Evercore and FT Partners advised Siris Capital, Equiniti’s founding investor since 2021.
Learn more: Kraken parent Payward to acquire derivatives exchange Bitnomial for $550 million in cash and stock
