Bullish

And yes, this is a tech podcast.

We're going to discuss AI-assisted proxy voting, responsibility from those decisions, employee training, and Equinity's planned combination with Bullish.

And for anyone trying to understand tokenization without getting lost in the terminology, I'm hoping that today's conversation will provide you with a very useful starting point.

But enough for me.

When we realized this about a year ago, we knew that the transfer agents were going to be in a great position to better serve their issuers, and we were looking at ways that we could provide that service to our issuers.

We looked at the usual things.

Should we build a solution? Should we buy a solution? Should we buy a company that provides a solution? Should we partner with someone? And in those discussions, we met Bullish and Tom Farley, who's the CEO of Bullish, who's a former president of the New York Stock Exchange.

He and I met and the partners at Cirrus met, and we realized that the best way to move forward together was to bullish to actually acquire Equinity.

It could mark another important step forward for Gibraltar.

But what does this actually mean for investors and businesses? And could it give Gibraltar a competitive advantage? Well, I'm now joined by right here at the RAC by Randy Abernethy, who's head of clearing and group risk at Bullish and Ding Chen, the company's head of regulatory affairs.

So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having us.

And if I'm airline, for example, I might want to offer my shareholders an additional miles to encourage our shareholders to fly with us more.

So that is the opportunity that blockchain can bring.

So Bullish is working with the Gibraltar government on a framework for this, but why Gibraltar? What attracted Bullish to Gibraltar?

Well, I can say, and Randy can supplement, I think for us, Gibraltar had always been a place that offers a robust investor protection-first regulatory framework, that there is a great degree of certainty, but also agile enough for a move quickly with its businesses.

So you can imagine the spectrum of what you might consider stocks that are as real as it gets to stocks that are less quote unquote real, right? So you can imagine like on one side of the spectrum, you have something like the transfer agent model.

So there's a lot of great companies in this category, companies like Superstate, companies like Equinity, which is owned by Bullish.

And this is as real as it gets.

This is the canonical record.

We'll provide them with the ability to tokenize shares and hold them on the same record.

So you, you may have read in, um, that we, we are in the process of being acquired by, by a company called Bullish.

Right, I wanna talk about that.

Bullish, Bull- Bullish is a crypto exchange.

On the day that, that we announced the purchase, the signing of the purchase, we're still in the, we're still not yet, not yet closed.

On the day we announced the signing of the purchase, Tom Farley, who's the CEO of Bullish, and I stood on stage at a, at an eve- uh, in- industry conference and actually transferred tokenized shares of Bullish from him to me.

And Tom is a former CEO of the exchange or chairman of the exchange or something of that sort?

Of, of the New York S- He wa- he was president of the New York Stock Exchange.

And then when NASDAQ bought it back again, they had already bought another company, and they rebranded it as Globe Newswire, which is its current name, and they sold it to Apollo for $300 million, and Apollo just sold it last year to a British fintech for $540 million, and that fintech itself got sold two months ago for $4.2 billion, of which about maybe 20%, 25% of the value was Globe Newswire.

And interestingly enough, in terms of just irony, is it got bought by Bullish, which is a crypto exchange.

It has nothing to do with crypto, but it got bought by a crypto exchange, Bullish.

And so that's sort of like, you know, kind of where I was really best known, aside from which having a series of PR firms.

You know, in the 1990s, I helped launch, you know, the Motley Fool and like a lot of, you know, consumer internet companies.

And then what, what's surprising to me is Ice, which to-- complete throwback, Ice invested in, in Coinbase's Series C in 2014.

My, my neighbor used to be the president of the New York Stock Exchange, he's now the CEO of Bullish, Tom Farley.

But, um, to, to see them actually doing something here it, at, at the kind of starting line as, as you think about, um, is a, is a pretty bullish signal for just tokenization generally, right? Usually you'd see the startups do it and then the, the incumbents would be a few years behind.

But for Ice to be doing something in the space with OKX, which is as crypto native as it gets, I, I think it, it, it bodes well for tokenization as an overall, uh, trend.

This project may certainly have a lot of potential.

So Pantera Capital and Bullish also participated in the ANVL purchase as Anvil rolls out software designed to make its collateral protocol easier for businesses to integrate.

So you got some very big names here.

Obviously, Peter Thiel's fund, Pantera Capital, that's Dan Moorhead and Bullish.

You got a bunch of others.

So Anvil built on Ethereum is designed to allow digital assets to be used as collateral for financial commitments, including payments and credit.

We have a data business as well, which is Coindesk Data.

And we are owned by the institutional exchange Bullish, which acquired Coindesk more than two years ago.

Right.

Okay.