管理層發言
Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Bullish Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Operator instructions were provided. I would now like to hand the call over to Michael Fedele, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I'm Michael Fedele, and I'm joined on today's call by our Chief Executive Officer, Tom Farley; Chief Financial Officer, David Bonanno; and Director of Corporate Development, Liam Foley. This call will contain forward-looking statements, including those relating to our expected performance and business opportunities, our proposed acquisition of Equiniti Group, the anticipated benefits and strategic rationale of the transaction, expected timing and closing conditions and business opportunities following the transaction. These statements are not assurances of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such risks include, among others, the possibility that the Equiniti transaction may not be completed, failure to obtain required regulatory approvals, the possibility that anticipated benefits may not be realized and the risks related to the integration of Equiniti's business. For more details on these and other risks, please refer to today's earnings press release and our SEC filings, including our 20-F dated March 9, 2026. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. This call will also include a discussion of non-IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable IFRS metrics can be found in our earnings press release and presentation, which also contain additional information regarding non-IFRS financial measures and key performance indicators. I'll now turn the call over to Tom.
Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm Tom Farley, Chairman and CEO of Bullish. A year ago today, Bullish went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you for following us and supporting us as a public company. A year ago today, our old school certificated shares began changing hands. A year later, I'm pleased to share with you that beginning yesterday, Bullish's tokenized shares are trading on our own regulated venue for the first time. This also marks Bullish's first trades of any tokenized security. This is just the beginning. We are building the infrastructure for tokenized securities. And this quarter, we turned that from a blueprint into something real. Our business has remained diversified and resilient against a soft quarter for crypto with prices and volatility down across the market. Our diversified largely recurring revenue base and mission-critical product offerings have helped carry us through, and our pending acquisition of Equiniti will be another step towards further business model resilience. Regarding Equiniti, we're on track to close in January 2027. We have all of the antitrust clearances secured and other regulatory approvals are advancing. Both companies are already building today for the future combined business. What excites me most is the demand from public companies, Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains and other market participants who want to get started in earnest on issuing tokenized securities. The build of this ecosystem will take time, but the interest and demand are already there. I'm pleased to share that on October 27, we'll be headed to the New York Stock Exchange for a showcase where we'll share a first look at the tokenization platform. We will introduce new issuer and Layer 1 partners and demonstrate live tokenized equity issuance and trading. Tokenization of security sits at the heart of our strategy and is the central theme in the modernization of market structure. Tokenization is the process of turning static traditional financial assets into active programmable blockchain-based assets. In May, we announced our agreement to acquire Equiniti, the second largest transfer agent in the world. Tokenized real-world assets on chain have grown more than 20-fold since around 2024 to roughly $37 billion. Tokenized cash in the form of stablecoins is now around $290 billion. Securities are the largest wave still to come, a roughly $270 trillion market that Citi sees reaching about $5.5 trillion tokenized by 2030. I believe this is quite conservative. Not all tokenization is the same, and that distinction is the basis of our strategy. We are focused on issuer-sponsored tokenization, where the company itself chooses to tokenize its actual shares and its transfer agent records the token as the real legal share on the official register. That is very different from a synthetic token where a third party wraps a claim on a share it holds elsewhere or maybe doesn't even hold it elsewhere at all, and the issuer sees none of the benefits of this tokenization. When the issuer, on the other hand, creates the token, the token is the actual share, true legal title, the issuer can finally see who owns its stock. Corporate actions and voting can be programmed into the instrument and a greater share of the economics can flow back to the issuer. Investors gain too. They benefit from smoother collateralization of their holdings, around-the-clock trading, instant and atomic settlement, fractional access and access to shareholder rewards and a more direct relationship with public company issuers, a facet that issuers are also very excited about. I'd like to spend a few moments telling you a little more about Equiniti because the stand-alone business deserves to be better known. Equiniti maintains the share register, the legal record of ownership for nearly 3,000 corporate issuers, including roughly half of the FTSE 100 and 30% of the S&P 500. It serves more than 20 million shareholders and moves over $0.5 trillion of payments each year. We believe it is one of only two players of real scale in its markets with high barriers to entry, over 95% client retention rates and relationships that average well over a decade. And Equiniti is far more than a register. It runs five connected services as laid out on Page 24 of the slide deck that are at the center of how public companies and their shareholders interact. Each service is mission-critical, sticky and recurring. And together, they make Equiniti indispensable to how thousands of public companies operate. I'll now turn to how the Bullish business performed this quarter, starting with the exchange. On spot, our core market, trading volumes moderated with the broader crypto market, but we kept deepening our institutional footprint. One of the largest global wealth managers in the world selected Bullish as the exclusive crypto trading provider for their Asia business, and we began relationships with many new customers such as SoFi, Berenberg, Bit2Me, and BitGo Prime and others. We keep winning the institutions that value a regulated venue. On options and derivatives, in a positive development, we now believe we will gain access to the U.S. market for our perps, dated futures and options markets in the next several months, nearly a year earlier than we previously anticipated. We believe that the United States is by far the largest global market for derivatives and represents a huge opportunity for Bullish to be amongst the first to offer onshore crypto derivatives. While industry volumes have contracted this year as volatility came down, we still believe that the digital assets derivatives markets will grow more quickly than spot volumes in the years to come. In the second quarter, we reduced trading incentives, prepared our U.S. readiness plan and started putting in place partnerships with retail broker-dealers and also went live with other key market participants such as market access provider Paradigm. While our volumes and market share declined in the second quarter, we are excited about our new strategic positioning and the long-term opportunity. Beyond the exchange, our media and events business continues to generate business opportunities throughout the Bullish business. Consensus, our flagship conference, drew more than 16,000 people from over 100 countries to Miami, where we tokenized our own cap table live on stage, a first for an NYSE-listed company. CoinDesk and Consensus power our whole franchise. We are able to gather the industry together in a way that consistently generates new business opportunities. coindesk.com, our media arm, continues to experience strong growth with page views up by 10 million in Q2 2026, a 38% year-over-year increase. Unique visitors increased 83% against the same period prior year, and our market share continues to consolidate. Our CoinDesk indices continue to power institutional products. In April, Morgan Stanley chose CoinDesk as the benchmark index for their flagship Bitcoin ETP, which has already reached roughly $400 million in assets. We continue to win repeat business with our licensees. For example, Grayscale launched their hyper-liquid ETP with our indices in June and Morgan Stanley launched with Ethereum and Solana ETPs with us in late July. We're putting wins on the board, but index revenue scales with the value of assets in each product. So a softer price environment has held total index revenue back even as we gained share and our mandates add up. Liquidity services delivers sticky recurring revenue from our delivery of the listing, liquidity and visibility that every asset needs to come to market and trade well. In Q2, we continued adding great new clients, including the first exchange to list SoFi's new stablecoin, SoFiUSD. Finally, on the topic of regulation and legislation here in the United States, the CLARITY Act did not advance this session. While clear market structure legislation would help the entire industry, our strategy does not depend on it. Per reporting by Bloomberg, the SEC is expected to publish a so-called innovation exemption potentially in the weeks ahead, which would provide some rules of the road for tokenized securities. We have advocated for this innovation exemption and would welcome this as great progress. We and issuers are hopeful that this announcement will include provisions that provide control to the issuer of the token issuance process. If indeed, the SEC does provide a role for the issuer, we believe this will further cement the importance of the issuer-sponsored token and provide further validation that our acquisition of Equiniti was the right partnership at the right time. And practically speaking, this innovation exemption will prompt a dialogue among all of our issuer customers about tokenization on an accelerated timeline. Thank you again for your support over the last year. I'll hand it to Dave.
Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. This morning, we published our second quarter 2026 financial results alongside the 6-K filed with the SEC as well as our earnings press release and investor presentation available on our IR website. As a reminder, reconciliations of our non-IFRS metrics are included in today's earnings presentation and 6-K. Now turning to our second quarter adjusted financial results and KPIs as shown on Page 14 of today's presentation. Total adjusted revenue was $92.6 million, essentially flat with the first quarter and up 62% year-over-year. Subscription services and other revenue reached a record $62.7 million during the second quarter and adjusted transaction revenue came in at $29.9 million. Adjusted operating expenses for the second quarter were $63.1 million, reflecting our previously provided guidance that 2Q would represent our peak level of quarterly adjusted operating expenses in 2026. Our increased operating expenses were driven by Consensus related costs and approximately $2.5 million in one-time compensation expenses tied to our broader business transformation. This investment in our human capital included signing bonuses for incoming senior talent and retention and relocation bonuses for some of our existing leaders. These one-time compensation expenses will be offset in the second half of the year by efficiencies already realized in Q3 as we continue to optimize our spending across the entire cost base. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA was $29.5 million at an approximately 32% margin, and adjusted net income was $14.3 million after finance expense of $14.5 million. Turning to our balance sheet, as shown on Page 17, we ended the quarter with net liquid assets of $2.1 billion. Looking forward for the remainder of the year, we've updated Bullish's 2026 full year guidance as shown on Page 22, narrowing our previously provided guidance due to increased full year visibility. SS&O revenue is now expected to be between $225 million to $245 million. Based on our current outlook, we expect the second half SS&O revenue implied by our guidance will be split roughly 45% in the third quarter and 55% in the fourth quarter with new partnerships already signed and coming online this quarter driving that expected sequential growth. Adjusted operating expenses are expected to be between $225 million to $230 million, roughly equally split between the third and fourth quarter. We continue to expect full year finance expenses of $52 million to $60 million. And as a reminder, we do not guide on adjusted transaction revenue, and we encourage everyone to review our monthly trading metrics posted on our IR website. Finally, we are maintaining our full year 2026 financial outlook for Equiniti as well as our medium-term combined outlook as previously discussed during our May announcement and first quarter earnings calls and as covered on Pages 26 and 27 of today's presentation. With that, I'll turn it back to Tom for closing remarks.
Thanks, Dave. And now we'll open it up for Q&A.
分析師問答
Operator instructions were provided. Our first question comes from the line of Brian Bedell of Deutsche Bank.
Maybe just to start on the tokenization theme for equities. Tom, maybe if you could just talk about how you see the two ecosystems evolving. When I say that, I mean the synthetic versus the actual. Clearly, your model is based on the actual, but we're seeing early progress certainly on the synthetic side. And I guess the question would be, to what extent do you see those two forms of trading tokenized stocks coexisting in the future? Or do you think the share of tokenized versions will move really to the actual—your model?
Brian, thanks so much. Great question. And it underscores the nature of the questions we're getting on tokenization. I remember just three months ago when we announced the deal, the questions were of the flavor, will tokenization ever happen? And they've moved to how quickly will tokenization happen? And even—well, when it happens, how much will you win by, which is great as we derisk the thesis of the acquisition. To answer your question directly, I have no doubt that both models will survive and maybe even thrive. And it's not dissimilar from the traditional equity markets today. Think the actual share versus an ETF or the actual share versus an ADR or even an actual share versus, in some cases, a fund structure or a derivative structure or a structured product. So too, in a tokenized world, you will see multiple different models. For example, the synthetic model may well be sufficient for a small offshore retail customer who doesn't understand credit risk, doesn't care to understand credit risk and is flipping in and out of a share at midnight. An institutional New York, London, Hong Kong-based firm that manages customer money is certainly not going to hold some IOU or derivative that goes through a credit chain that involves, for example, multiple brokers. So I suspect you will see both evolve. The issuers will insist upon it because only the issuer-sponsored token is the actual share and only the issuer-sponsored token really offers a considerable benefit to the issuer themselves.
Yes, that's great perspective. And then just my second follow-up question on the revenue synergies on the trading side that you're seeing evolving and then combined with the comments that you made about the traction with retail broker-dealers and advancing derivatives crypto trading, to what extent do you see that enhancing your trading volumes coming into the second half? Of course, you don't guide to that for the trading volumes, but just trying to get a sense of the organic component of that in the second half and into '27 potentially.
Thanks, Brian. We don't expect a major uplift to transaction revenues during 2026 from tokenized equities, but we certainly expect that during 2027, that will be a contributor to our business. As Tom mentioned, we already trade securities today. Bullish stock is trading live on our own platform. We expect the number of stocks and issuers to come on platform with issuer native tokens to increase throughout the back half of the year. We also believe that the development of additional regulated trading venues globally that will be trading tokenized stocks will help increase the broader liquidity profile of the asset class, and we do expect in 2027 to see some benefits to our trading activities from tokenized stocks.
Yes. And Brian, just to reflect on this moment that we're in, we were on this call a year ago or a year ago today was our IPO. And if I can kind of frame that moment, Bitcoin was round numbers $120,000. The market cap of digital assets was around about $4 trillion. Fast forward to today, the price of Bitcoin is around about $60,000. The market cap of crypto is round numbers, $2 trillion. And as you and we both know in this industry, because it is still relatively nascent, as price goes, so goes volatility, so go trading volumes. And so we don't want to get on this call in mid-August and cheerlead for trading volumes, not having a clear crystal ball in terms of what will happen for prices and volatility throughout the year. What I will tell you is—and you saw this in some of the comments in our prepared remarks, but you'll continue to see it in the months and quarters ahead—we're doing everything to grow market share. And we're doing well, and we're winning across the board, meaning if you look at the portfolio of products that we offer, adding new institutional customers, adding new partners, adding new regulated venues. As Dave just said, as of yesterday, for the very first time, we traded and are now able to trade tokenized securities. So we are there ready to capture the growth when it ultimately comes back to digital assets. But we don't want to overpromise because we don't know exactly what's going to happen. On the other hand, we do know that tokenized securities trading is going to be a huge wave. Again, it's a $270 trillion market. And so any small slice of that that comes on board in the back half of 2026 and certainly 2027, that's an opportunity that ultimately, I'm not saying immediately, but ultimately will dwarf the trading opportunity of pure crypto assets and that $2 trillion market cap that I referenced at the outset.
Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi of Canaccord Genuity.
Nice to see all the progress along the evolution here of market structure and the like. I wanted to drill down on potentially being able to open up the U.S. market for options and derivatives potentially a year earlier. If you could kind of double-click on that comment, where that's coming from? Obviously, maybe the regulatory environment is favorable, but just a little more color there would be great.
Yes. No, I appreciate the question. And I'm kind of a closet derivatives regulation nerd. So I appreciate the nuance here. I spent the formative part of my career managing futures, exchanges and clearinghouses. And there was kind of a path that was a quite painful path for getting access for certain marketplaces, and it involved the full approval of the full complement of a futures trading platform, a futures clearinghouse as well as an FCM in order to access the U.S. market. But a new pathway has opened up where if you operate an adult compliant, responsible overseas platform as we do and have for many years, as you know, we're regulated by some of the toughest regulators on planet Earth, including the Germans at BaFin, and the Hong Kong regulators and New York with a BitLicense and so on and so forth, that you're able to access the U.S. should you get the necessary approvals with an approved FCM, which in futures parlance is a broker-dealer. So if you have an approved FCM, you can leverage that compliant overseas trading platform. And so perhaps it was a lack of imagination on our part or my part personally. But that new pathway, we believe, has become available. And should we go through the right hoops and steps here over the next couple of months, we believe we'll be able to access in an unfettered way the U.S. markets for derivatives.
That's great and good luck with that, Tom. And then kind of on, I guess, a related note on the regulatory front, if you've got any additional comments on that, I guess, what was that innovators carve-out or something like that relative to tokenized equities and favoring the underlying versus the synthetic and what we might expect there and market reaction and issuer reaction to that kind of rule coming out of the SEC, I guess?
Sure. Yes. I'll share a few breadcrumbs, but some of our conversations will remain confidential out of respect for our regulator in D.C. The CLARITY Act would provide a fair amount of certainty, but at a high level, the certainty that the CLARITY Act was providing was largely around traditional crypto assets. In other words, you have coins that fall into an ambiguous world that's part commodity, part security, and it gets difficult in some cases to figure out whether you should be working under the auspices of the CFTC or the SEC. In addition, imagine somebody holds a portfolio with something that's more commodity and something that's more security. Do the rules exist where I can hold them in a single portfolio? That was the kind of thing the CLARITY Act was addressing, along with some clarity around DeFi and what was and wasn't allowed in the DeFi world. What it was doing less of was providing a whole lot of certainty around tokenization. I actually view that as a positive. The market we're going after is the tokenization of the global securities market. We have 100 years of legislation and regulation underpinning the global securities market. It's actually abundantly clear. Nonetheless, there are some elements of ambiguity, and I applaud the SEC for saying, 'We want there to be clarity here because we're not going to engage in regulation by enforcement.' The SEC has set out to provide this innovation exemption. The intent is to help this market develop with some safe harbors so people like us, issuers, broker-dealers and exchanges would understand how to go about tokenization. They're taking their time rolling it out. There were reports this week that we could see it soon. I don't think we will see it this week. This is the kind of thing I'd rather come out and be good than come out and be quick. Now to go to the core issue you're talking about—issuer-sponsored versus non-issuer sponsored—I don't know exactly what the text is going to say, so this isn't inside information. But there was a great concern from the issuer industry around tokenization as it started to take hold about four or five months ago. Look no further than our CFO sitting to my left to see a frustrated public market issuer, where all of a sudden, your stock is so-called stock on some platform you've never heard of, but it's not your stock. It's a derivative or some sort of warehouse receipt that may or may not be backed by your stock. When something goes wrong, you're getting calls from investors blaming you even though you have nothing to do with it. The issuers want control of this process. They want to be able to say, 'If we're going to issue this thing, we want it to be our stock, not some derivative transaction. At a minimum, you can't use our name or call it our stock—you need to do the appropriate disclosures.' I think the SEC hears that, and I think the SEC wants to enshrine the role of the issuer. From a dollars-and-cents perspective, that's great for us because at Equiniti, we've been having these conversations with issuers. I want to be clear: when I say 'we' and 'issuers' I'm talking about a pro forma world where we have successfully closed the Equiniti deal. There are, of course, risks, and I just wanted to highlight that comment.
Our next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon of Jefferies.
Tom, you talked about a lot of momentum in terms of new firms signing up for crypto trading, I think mainly on the spot side. But can you talk about the backdrop of, or I should say, the backlog of firms that you are in conversations with and how to think about the evolution of both spot trading adoption from an institutional perspective as well as derivative trading?
Sure. I'll let Dave chime in as well, Dan. Because I'm an optimist, I'll start with the positive. Pipeline is as large as it's ever been, and it continues to include more and more institutional names as time passes. The logos that we're adding are among the most credible that we've ever added in our company's history. The benefit of adding a credible logo is that these are durable companies that don't change their mind about their strategies on a quarterly or semiannual basis. All of that is great. We are among the very, very top exchanges when it comes to credibility. We can walk into the German regulator and get approval. We can work with New York State regulators and have received permission to operate in that locale. There are very few exchanges like that, and that's why we win institutions. We have great liquidity at a low cost, a feature-rich platform, and we're known for running a reliable platform that's highly compliant. Crypto is a weak environment for trading right now, Dan. I don't think the CLARITY Act not passing this session is helpful. I'd hoped it would bring another wave of institutions into crypto. Some institutions still don't hold Bitcoin for private wealth clients in the United States. So feel really good about the pipeline. We continue to build features, regulatory approvals and our jurisdictional footprint globally. But I'm even more excited about trading of tokenized securities on this platform we've built. That may well turn out to be the giant growth opportunity that none of us saw coming as opposed to traditional crypto assets.
That's helpful. I appreciate the clarity there. And then just in the context of SS&O, obviously you narrowed the guidance. The momentum in that side of the business actually seems quite good. Maybe, Dave, can you unpack a little bit of what's happening versus what you thought at the beginning of the year when you initially gave the guidance and kind of where things sit today?
Thanks, Dan. To be clear, we've maintained the midpoint of the guide. We've just narrowed it here today. Given the environment we've seen over the last 6, 9, 12 months where Bitcoin has been down 50%, alts down 50% to 75%, interest rates from a year ago down almost 20%, we're extremely pleased with the resiliency of our SS&O line item. Tom touched on it a little bit, and there's a slide in the deck. We continue to use the Consensus event as an acquisition channel and also as a cross-sell vehicle to create stickier revenue. Over half of our Consensus sponsorship revenue came from customers with multiple different products. We are beginning to see renewed momentum in our pipeline of SS&O, particularly around tokenization. It's not just because of the Equiniti transaction. In general, tokenization is becoming the fastest-growing part of the crypto marketplace, and it's a bigger TAM. We're excited about this new position of our business and the new developments in the market, and we think the business we've built is perfectly positioned to ride those tailwinds across all of our different line items, but especially in SS&O and liquidity services.
Our next question comes from the line of Pete Christiansen of Citi.
Tom and Dave, question on capturing economics for tokenized equities. When you think about the issuer-sponsored model, is the objective here for the shares to trade primarily on Bullish? Or do you envision the token being interoperable across multiple chains and venues with Equiniti serving as the authoritative registry? And in this open architecture framework, where do you expect Bullish to capture the majority of economics?
Great question. There are two parts to that: walled garden versus interoperable, and the economic model. On interoperability, we are absolutely building our token to be interoperable. On October 27th, we'll give you more information and in the months ahead we'll drop a few breadcrumbs. We're engaged with regulated trading venues, traditional crypto venues, TradFi firms about interoperability of issuer-sponsored tokens with those platforms. I also see interoperability working with central securities depositories in jurisdictions where we operate. One model is that a central securities depository holds the actual share for safekeeping and issues a synthetic token on top of that—an entitlement. It wouldn't surprise me to see that model persist in various forms, and they may hold the issuer-sponsored token rather than the old book-entry share. Early days will likely have multiple blockchains; it's unlikely a single blockchain will gain 90-plus percent market share right away. Regarding the economic model, we offer several services for tokenization that can be monetized. We can consult with the customer on token design; generate the token using our tokenization factory; list it on our regulated venue; provide liquidity on our venue or other venues including regulated and DeFi venues; provide visibility via CoinDesk and events like Consensus; act as the transfer agent, which today earns a low per-customer fee but will be a value-added service; and provide other investor communications and engagement tools like GlobeNewswire and investor tools through Notified and Equiniti. CFOs will need to understand who's trading it, who the holders are, how to reward holders, and more. The number of services we can provide—and charge for—are many, so it's difficult to give an exhaustive view of exact economics, but the opportunities to capture economics are across those service lines.
Pete, I'd frame it this way: our focus will be on the issuer and the success of every issuer customer, delivering great value for money by tokenizing their stock and offering other services. We expect the Bullish Exchange to be a beneficiary of issuer success. We expect liquidity services to be a core product going forward, but the focus is on issuers first, and we believe transaction revenue will follow.
That's really helpful. I do want to ask, though, about some of the carve-outs from the Equiniti deal, particularly things like retirement solutions and customer resolutions, those sorts of things. I know those are faster-growing parts of Equiniti's competitors. I'm just curious, does that create a client retention issue by separating those components of the deal?
No, Pete, those are largely independent businesses from the issuers, particularly the resolution business and the pension business. They are not related to tokenization and issuer success. Our focus is issuer success. We're happy to part with those assets because we don't believe they'll fit our growth or margin profile going forward. They are distinct from our tokenization and issuer-centric focus.
To give an example, one of those businesses sets up temporary call centers during a crisis—entirely unrelated to what we're building here. So no, the short answer is no; they're almost entirely unrelated.
Our next question comes from the line of Ken Worthington of JPMorgan.
I know you don't break it out, but maybe you can help us directionally on what happened to liquidity services revenue in 2Q relative to 1Q. Did it shrink? Did it grow? Was it largely unchanged from last quarter? And are there any sort of puts and takes to call out in this quarter?
Thanks for the question, Ken. We don't give that level of detail. In general, liquidity services in the second quarter was resilient. There were headwinds versus the first quarter with overall lower prices in the environment. We had new bookings during the quarter, but not as many as we're experiencing today. Excluding Consensus, we're happy with the stability of liquidity services and SS&O revenue during the second quarter. It was broadly in line with the underlying business from the first quarter—a couple of different puts and takes—but steady, and we're proud of that resilience.
Okay. And maybe bigger picture, David, you and I have talked about this a bunch, but can you talk to what's happening with dematerialization in the U.K. and the potential impact on Equiniti's U.K. profit? If the business moves away from shareholder accounts to more omnibus structures, how does that impact the number and types of services offered by Equiniti? How does that impact revenue? And what is the time frame for dematerialization?
Thanks, Ken. The dematerialization process, and this became clear in the July report from the dematerialization task force published mid-July, is simply the process for the removal of paper shares from the U.K. market. Furthermore, the report begins and ends with the acknowledgment that tokenization should be developed not just in parallel, but is likely to come before some of the further steps contemplated by the task force, such as an intermediate model. Even in that intermediate model, we believe Equiniti is a beneficiary of the process to remove paper shares. We have a broker-dealer; some competitors do not. We believe there will be customers up for grabs, and we'll be well positioned to get those customers in the future. The removal of paper shares is currently scheduled for the end of next year. In the appendices of the deck, less than 2% of Equiniti revenue is directly related to paper certificates and mail revenue. It's de minimis to their financial profile and even more de minimis to the combined profile. We believe the convergence of tokenization and dematerialization is a tailwind to Equiniti that will more than offset that less than 2% exposure.
I'm glad you asked. We diligenced their businesses on both sides of the pond. There are puts and takes where the transfer agent would have a tail of customers to hold on to, but it's also pushing toward broker-dealer activity, and we're the only ones with a captive, well-run broker-dealer. We view this as a net opportunity. The dematerialization/tokenization conversation in the U.K. accelerates conversations and gives us an open door to talk to customers, educate them, and be their advisor as they move to a tokenized world.
Our next question comes from the line of Owen Lau of Clear Street.
I hear that you're going to have a tokenization showcase in October, and you may be limited to what you can say. But could you please give us an update on the pipeline of issuers wanting to tokenize their shares, the profile of these companies? What are they excited about in the tokenization opportunity? And what do you expect to get out from this event in October?
Owen, thanks. We announced the Equiniti acquisition in May and are deep in planning the integration post-close. We're already collaborating on solutions including tokenization. We bought a strong, established company that had some areas to renovate, but importantly we found even deeper issuer relationships than expected. The issuer pipeline for tokenization conversations is filling up. Still early days—the activity looks like it will increase this quarter and more so in Q4. If I had to handicap it, I see activity in the latter half of 2026, and an in‑earnest growth trajectory in 2027 because the ecosystem needs to develop. For example, trading solutions for these tokens are nascent—we literally started trading tokenized securities yesterday. We feel great about the pipeline, though timing is uncertain, and you'll learn much more on October 27. That event will provide a holistic perspective of the ecosystem—not just issuers but Layer 1s and Layer 2s and other partners. Blockchains are eager to be chosen to host issuer tokens. There are tokenization discussions already with companies that would be multiples of the current $37 billion of tokenized assets. Issuers are excited for a variety of reasons: consumer goods companies want a direct relationship with customers and the ability to reward holders—discounts, tickets, loyalty points—and to have better shareholder engagement. Other companies value accelerated dividends for loyal holders, additional voting rights, 24/7 trading. It's not one size fits all, but there are many compelling use cases.
And then my follow-up on modeling. Your second quarter adjusted OpEx seems a little higher than expected, but you only raised the low end of your full year OpEx guidance a bit. So the implied second half expense runway was much lower. On a Bullish stand-alone basis, is the second half run rate a good exit rate going into 2027? Is there any Equiniti-related investment we should be aware of for later this year?
Thanks, Owen. The second quarter featured higher expenses than we expect from any other quarter this year. That's driven by variable expenses associated with Consensus as well as the $2.5 million of one-time compensation expenses related to our business transformation: signing bonuses for new hires and retention and relocation bonuses for certain existing executives. We maintain tight cost control and have already realized additional synergies and further headcount reductions in Q3 to keep us in line with the guide. I would not say the back half of the year is representative of the run rate for 2027 because that would exclude variable Consensus related expenses we have in the first and second quarters. The baseline in the second half of the year excluding Consensus is roughly good. We'll probably expand over time as we invest in the platform, but we intend to hit our guidance and maintain tight cost control. The $2.5 million was anomalous and will not recur and will be offset in the back half of the year by synergies we've already realized.
Our next question comes from the line of Ed Engel of Compass Point.
As you think about competing with some of these synthetic issuers, is there anything you can do to jump-start distribution of issuer-sponsored shares? I saw you mentioned onboarding market makers like Wintermute. I'm wondering how you're thinking about solving the cold start problem relative to synthetic assets, which achieved pretty strong distribution quickly.
Good question. That's exactly why we did the Equiniti acquisition—we have 3,000 issuers we can go to with an out-of-the-box product. The issuer is in control, so it's not an overnight event where all 3,000 start on the same day. But the difference between us and the synthetic model is durability: once you've created an issuer-sponsored token, it's there for as long as the company is public. It cannot just disappear the next day. We don't see a cold start problem; we see an accelerated start, though adoption won't be simultaneous across all issuers. The synthetic models may get distribution quickly in some pockets, but we expect issuer-sponsored tokens to be far more durable.
Our next question comes from the line of Rayna Kumar of Oppenheimer & Company.
A lot of my questions have already been asked, but if I can maybe switch to certain other aspects of the business. Much of the conversation pertaining to CoinDesk over the past few quarters has revolved around wins on the indices and data side and of course, on Consensus events. But if you can narrow in on the CoinDesk media segment, maybe comment on your outlook for this media portion of your business, excluding events? Metrics on Slide 14 highlight some strong growth—38% page view growth in Q2. Wondering if this will primarily remain focused on supporting the broader ecosystem through visibility and cross-selling, or if it could grow into a meaningful stand-alone piece as well?
Thanks for the question. We're happy with the recent success in viewer counts at CoinDesk. Those have improved dramatically, thanks to new leadership we brought in late last year. We are currently not monetizing all those extra eyeballs through banner ads in a heavy way; we want to keep the website premium. It is directed mainly at the benefit of our existing issuers and partners and broadening our reach. We're pleased with the resumed growth in views and expect it to be a beneficiary of our broader business transformation toward tokenization.
There are days when the market share of that business is a majority of crypto media. We've carved out a role at the intersection of technology and finance that we can grow for years to come. As Dave said, it's helpful for us to use that asset for advertising and opportunities across the Bullish portfolio.
Our next question comes from the line of Nathan Frankovitz of Cantor Fitzgerald.
Tom, on your comment that $5 trillion in tokenized equities by 2030 might be a bit conservative—can you walk through what factors might most influence whether that number plays out above or below that estimate? And as a follow-up, any thoughts on how that $5 trillion plus could be distributed between blockchains, such as particular Layer 1s or categories like newer permissioned systems?
Really good question. Citi's analysis is excellent; I'm speaking more anecdotally. I had a conversation on Tuesday with the CEO of a roughly $70 billion company about tokenizing their stock. The math isn't hard from anecdotal evidence to get beyond $5 trillion to $6 trillion by 2030. I see a slow start, almost a trickle, and then a catalytic event—perhaps a big IPO that is tokenized only—and once institutions, broker-dealers and the market flip to tokenized shares, you can rapidly surpass $5 trillion. I'm more top-down and anecdotal here based on what we're seeing. The question 'will tokenization happen?' is no longer in doubt; it's now about how fast it happens and to what extent we lead. Regarding blockchains, I don't have a clear crystal ball. The most decentralized blockchains are working on privacy solutions; more permissioned systems are working on decentralization. Ultimately, whichever blockchains meet customer needs will win. We expect multiple winners and are open to several blockchains becoming important.
I would now like to turn the conference back to Tom Farley for closing remarks. Sir?
Hi, everyone, it's Dave. Tom had to jump to a customer call here. But thank you, everyone, for attending this morning's call. We look forward to staying in touch with all of you on this journey as we build out the future of financial infrastructure. Please reach out to our IR team with any follow-up questions, and we look forward to seeing everyone next quarter.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.