Bullish ( BLSH ) has agreed to acquire transfer agent and shareholder services firm Equiniti in a $4.25 billion deal that will combine traditional market infrastructure into its digital asset platform, expanding its push into tokenized securities.
The transaction provides Bullish, CoinDesk’s parent company, a regulated transfer agent, a required function for public companies alongside its existing tokenization, trading and market infrastructure capabilities.
Equiniti 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 equity ownership.
Together, the companies aim to offer an end-to-end platform covering token design, issuance, compliance, registry and secondary trading, which Blush sees as a key gap in blockchain-based capital markets: the lack of a dedicated transfer agent for tokenized assets.
“Tokenization is a generational shift in how capital markets operate, setting the infrastructure trend for the next 25 years,” Blush CEO Tom Farley said in the release.
“Wide adoption at institutional scale requires three things: end-to-end tokenization services, a single, unified ledger, and issuer relationships 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 services providers continue to push tokenizing securities. More recently, BlackRock-backed Securitize and Computershare said they plan to bring parts of the $70 trillion US stock market online through tokenized equities, a move that pushes traditional infrastructure closer to blockchain rails.
The M&A wave
Bullish’s acquisition of Equiniti also comes amid a broader wave of crypto consolidation, as firms race to build a complete financial infrastructure.
After a lull in 2022-2023, mergers and acquisitions picked up sharply in 2025, with more than 260 deals totaling nearly $8.6 billion, according to Pitchbook data. This amount is nearly four times that of the previous year, driven by clear regulation 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 firms for distribution and compliance scale. High-profile transactions—from Kraken’s move into regulated derivatives to MoonPay’s push into payments infrastructure—signal a shift away from speculation toward vertical integration and sustainable revenue models, a trend expected to continue through 2026.
The deal positions Bullish, which went public last year, to connect traditional equity infrastructure with blockchain rails, enabling features such as real-time cap table visibility, automated corporate actions and faster settlement, while supporting liquidity in tokenized shares, particularly for non-US investors.
At $4.25 billion, the Equiniti acquisition would rank among the largest crypto-related deals of all time, surpassing Coinbase’s $2.9 billion purchase of Derebit and Kraken’s $1.5 billion NinjaTrader deal. The size indicates how crypto M&A has moved beyond buy-to-let exchanges and captured the ground for regulated financial infrastructure.
Bullish’s last acquisition before the Equiniti deal was its 2023 purchase of CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, which marked its entry into media, data and index services alongside its trading business. In 2024, it also acquired data provider CCData, one of the UK’s regulated benchmark administrators and providers of digital asset data and index solutions.
The acquisition of Equiniti is expected to close in early 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.
Goldman Sachs acted as financial advisor to Bullish, while Evercore and FT Partners advised Siris Capital, a founding investor in Equiniti since 2021.
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