• Bullish, Equiniti, Alpaca, Apex Fintech Solutions and Drivewealth formed the Issuer Sponsored Token Coalition on September 24.

• The SEC granted a five-year conditional exemption for tokenized securities venues on September 17.

• Equiniti maintains official registers for nearly 3,000 issuers and more than 20 million shareholders.

Coalition Ties Tokenized Stocks to Official Registers

Five financial firms — crypto exchange operator Bullish, share-register specialist Equiniti, brokerage-infrastructure provider Alpaca, Apex Fintech Solutions and Drivewealth — launched the Issuer Sponsored Token Coalition on September 24, an attempt to connect tokenized US equities to the official shareholder registers kept by the companies that issued them. The group's premise is blunt: a token that mirrors a stock's price is not the same object as the stock itself. Many products sold under the tokenized-stocks label see an intermediary custody the real shares and offer only economic exposure to price movement; whether the holder appears on the issuer's register, and whether voting rights are attached, varies product by product. Drivewealth CEO Naureen Hassan stated the problem plainly, arguing that a large share of what is marketed as tokenized equity is not equity at all — investors believe they own shares when, in fact, they do not. The coalition intends to define technical standards and operating infrastructure spanning issuance, transfer, settlement, custody and secondary trading, so that voting rights, dividends and corporate actions such as share splits accrue to token holders through the issuer's own register. Timing is no accident: on September 17 the SEC granted a five-year, conditional exemption letting qualifying tokenized-securities venues operate permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools for limited on-chain trading of US-listed shares — a structure resembling the liquidity-pool model popularized by decentralized venues such as Hyperliquid. The conditions are strict: venues must verify that token holders receive the same rights and privileges as traditional shareholders, tradable tickers and volumes are capped, and token trading must halt simultaneously if the underlying stock halts. Per Bullish's official announcement, membership is non-binding — no participant is obliged to issue or list a security — and no new tokenized stock launched alongside the coalition's debut.

Alpaca's 94% Share Anchors the Rails

The lineup is effectively a vertical slice of US equity plumbing. Equiniti, the transfer agent Bullish agreed to acquire in May, maintains official registers for close to 3,000 issuers and more than 20 million shareholders — the register being the legally recognized record of who owns what — making it the bridge between issuer records and whatever ends up on-chain. Alpaca sits at the other end of the pipeline: as of mid-2026, the brokerage processed roughly 94% of tokenized US stocks and ETFs, with more than $1.5 billion in custodied underlying shares behind that flow — a figure defined by assets actually held in custody, not by the market cap of the tracked tickers. Apex supplies clearing and broker-dealer infrastructure that connects brokers and investors, while Drivewealth provides US equities access to global investment platforms. The coalition's own role map assigns issuer-facing shareholder services and transfer-agency work to Equiniti, the network linking traditional securities markets to on-chain venues to Alpaca, broker-dealer and investor connectivity to Apex, and US stock access and brokerage functions to Drivewealth. Beyond voting and dividends, the agenda covers settlement, custody, and the flow of corporate-action data between legacy market infrastructure and blockchain networks — the same interoperability problem that cross-chain messaging protocols such as LayerZero were built to address. For Bullish — a crypto exchange regularly listed among the Best Crypto Exchanges — the deal anchors a full-stack strategy spanning trading venue, register and on-chain issuance. Members will meet listed issuers and capital-markets representatives at the New York Stock Exchange on October 27 to discuss issuer-led tokenization models, a session framed as issuer recruitment rather than a product launch. No technical standards or product timelines have been published yet, and the coalition's formation does not itself move any security on-chain.

The Register Becomes the Battleground

COINOTAG's read: the SEC's same-rights requirement turns the shareholder register — not trading volume or holder counts — into the dividing line for tokenized equities. The ledger-of-record principle that Bitcoin maximalism defended for Bitcoin (BTC) is now migrating to equities, and issuers, not price-tracking wrappers, hold the key. If the exemption's conditions are enforced as written, economic-exposure products will fail the qualification test and the register-backed model becomes the only path to on-chain US shares. The October 27 NYSE session will show whether listed companies adopt issuer-led tokenization or leave the field to wrappers.