Wall Street’s back office still runs on systems built decades ago. A stock trade can take a business day to settle, and markets close every evening and weekend. Bullish, the New York Stock Ex
Wall Street’s back office still runs on systems built decades ago. A stock trade can take a business day to settle, and markets close every evening and weekend.
Bullish, the New York Stock Exchange-listed digital asset company, wants to change that by putting company shares on public blockchains, and Aptos is now part of that plan.
On Nov. 3, Bullish named Aptos, Solana and Ethereum as the first networks for its equity tokenization services.
Tokenization means turning an asset, in this case a company’s shares, into digital tokens that live on a blockchain.
Aptos is a layer-1 blockchain, a base network that apps are built on, originally incubated at Meta.
Bullish already works with Solana. The company says it plans to expand to Aptos and Ethereum, giving companies that issue shares a choice of where their tokenized stock lives.
It hasn’t given a launch date for either network.
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Aptos says its transactions are finalized in under a second for a fraction of a cent, and that tokenized funds from asset managers including Franklin Templeton and Apollo already run on it.
Those funds are real-world assets: traditional financial products, such as money market funds or credit, issued as tokens on a blockchain.
Aptos argues that hosting them shows large institutions already trust its network with regulated products.
The fee claim holds up in outside research. A Blockworks Research report published Oct. 20 put the median Aptos transaction fee at about $0.0003, even after the network raised fees tenfold in March.
The same report counted about $1.6 billion in stablecoins on Aptos. Stablecoins are tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar, and they’re the cash that tokenized assets usually trade against.
Aptos has also added privacy features that matter to institutions. Confidential APT went live on mainnet in September, letting users hide balances and transfer amounts if they choose.
In October, Aptos launched an encrypted mempool, a protected waiting area for pending transactions that stops others from seeing trades before they go through and jumping ahead of them.
Aptos is also preparing for the long term. In April, Coinbase’s Quantum Advisory Board named Aptos one of the two layer-1 networks most ready for future quantum computers, which could one day break today’s encryption.
Bullish says tokenized shares could support things today’s system wasn’t designed for.
These include round-the-clock markets, near-instant settlement, automated corporate actions such as dividend payouts, and real-time visibility into who owns a company’s shares.
The announcement follows an Oct. 27 event at the NYSE.
There, Bullish CEO Tom Farley and Dan Kramer, CEO of transfer agent Equiniti, moved 61 million tokenized Bullish shares on Solana.
Bullish says the transfer completed in seconds. A transfer agent keeps the official record of who owns a company’s stock.
Bullish agreed in May 2026 to acquire Equiniti in a $4.2 billion deal, which it expects to close in January 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.
Even with shares on several blockchains, Bullish says the official ownership record stays with the transfer agent.
The company says it intends to offer the same capabilities on Aptos, putting the network in line to host tokenized public equities alongside the funds it already supports.
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