Thomas W. Farley

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.

And that's what we're moving forward with.

So we are hosting on the 27th of October at the New York Stock Exchange with Bullish, an event to talk about the future of markets specifically around tokenization.

And we've got some leaders of the marketplace joining us.

Tom Farley, CEO of Bullish will be speaking, I'll be speaking, and we'll have some other industry leaders there.

If anyone is interested in attending, They can go to Aquinity.com or Bullish.com and the invitations are accessible there.

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 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.