Broadridge, the company that processes roughly 80 percent of outstanding US proxy votes and distributes materials for nearly 5,000 listed companies, joined the New York Stock Exchange’s tokenized securities platform on November 2, 2026, bringing shareholder tokenized proxy voting onchain to an exchange-regulated venue for the first time. The move arrives four days after the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation launched its own tokenization service with 20 Wall Street institutions. DTCC said corporate actions such as dividends, proxy voting and tender offers remain offchain in the near term.
Broadridge describes the partnership as infrastructure for issuer-sponsored tokenized securities rather than a live trading venue. NYSE received SEC approval for rule change SR-NYSE-2026-17 on April 17, 2026, but the platform is not yet live. Member firms must receive 30 days advance notice, and they must be SEC-registered broker-dealers with FINRA membership and access to DTC. NYSE must also complete outstanding regulatory clearances.
How tokenized proxy voting works
The system runs on a private, permissioned Avalanche layer-one network provisioned through AvaCloud, not the public Avalanche mainnet. That architecture restricts validator participation and gives regulators a controlled environment for auditability and transaction finality. It also preserves compatibility with tools built around the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Governance smart contracts connect tokenized share ownership to three core inputs: the meeting agenda, the issuer’s voting rules and a record-date snapshot of eligible token ownership. The voting rules can encode quorum thresholds and share-class voting weights. Shareholders authenticate through a supported wallet or through Broadridge’s existing ProxyVote platform for retail investors and ProxyEdge for institutional investors. Once the system checks the wallet against the ownership record, eligible holders can cast votes onchain.
That record-date design addresses the central oracle problem. Token ownership may change repeatedly between a meeting announcement and the vote, so the smart contract needs a verified historical state rather than the holder position at the moment of voting. Broadridge’s Avalanche layer-one network serves as the canonical record for that snapshot. After the meeting closes, the final result can be distributed across several chains while retaining one authoritative source.
The May 2026 annual meeting of Galaxy Digital demonstrated the approach. It was the first onchain proxy vote by a US-listed public company, and its complete result was distributed across several chains from the single Avalanche layer-one record. Broadridge launched its onchain governance platform in April and named Galaxy Digital Holdings as its first client. Broadridge also partnered with Ondo Finance, whose tokenized stocks and ETFs operate across Solana, Ethereum and BNB Chain, to connect wallet users with the same shareholder-rights infrastructure.
Why tokenized proxy voting needs trusted records
Tokenized equities have grown rapidly, but market value alone does not establish whether a token holder owns legal voting rights. RWA.xyz valued the tokenized equity market at 3.69 billion dollars, with Binance bStocks accounting for roughly 1.4 billion dollars. Binance states that its bStocks generally provide price exposure to an underlying share held in custody, while eligible holders may convert supported tokens into shares. Holding one of those tokens does not itself confer voting rights, and dividends are reinvested through a multiplier mechanism rather than paid as cash.
That distinction matters for the governance market. A blockchain can prove that a token changed hands, but it does not independently decide which ledger represents the issuer’s shareholder record or whether a wallet holder has the legal right to vote. NYSE is addressing part of that issue by adding Broadridge, Computershare, Equiniti and Superstate to a network that also includes Securitize and tZERO. Broadridge, Computershare and Equiniti together serve nearly 5,000 publicly listed companies. This combined client-base figure is separate from Broadridge’s roughly 80 percent share of outstanding US proxy votes.
The result is an institutional bridge between token ledgers and corporate registers. Instead of claiming that blockchain removes intermediaries, the arrangement uses regulated and established entities to keep those records aligned. Its success will depend on whether token ownership, legal ownership and voting entitlement remain synchronized across custodians, exchanges, transfer agents and issuers.
A concentrated intermediary moves onto a new rail
The partnership introduces an unresolved structural question. Broadridge’s position in conventional proxy distribution gives it substantial influence over the communication and execution of shareholder votes. Extending that role onchain can improve audit trails and settlement, but it can also extend the influence of the same concentrated intermediary that critics have challenged for years.
The Council of Institutional Investors has formally asked the SEC to require Broadridge to provide vote tallies to shareholder proposal proponents. The group characterizes Broadridge as holding a near monopoly over proxy distribution and argues that its position creates an obligation to demonstrate impartiality toward all parties, not only issuers. Broadridge previously removed a vote-all-items-with-management feature after SEC staff involvement.
Legal scholars have also cautioned that street-name holding remains a structural feature of US markets. Many shares are held through broker-dealers and DTC, while token holders may rely on custodians and exchanges. A permissioned chain can make transactions easier to inspect without eliminating those intermediaries. Additional questions include how temporary borrowing could be prevented from influencing a vote and how disclosure duties can be reconciled with pseudonymous wallet addresses.
Broadridge chief executive Tim Gokey characterized the company as provider-agnostic infrastructure rather than a proprietary platform. NYSE Group president Lynn Martin said the exchange’s entry into tokenization is driven by institutional responsibility rather than competitive pressure. Those positions emphasize continuity with established market safeguards, but they also place greater focus on whether Broadridge’s governance systems can be independently trusted.
Infrastructure is ready, but the market is not live
Broadridge’s broader distributed-ledger experience provides context for its governance ambitions. By August, its Distributed Ledger Repo platform was processing over 8 trillion dollars per month in tokenized repo transactions, averaging 365 billion dollars per day. That represented a 28 percent year-over-year increase. The figure relates to repo activity and should not be treated as tokenized equity trading volume.
The planned NYSE environment is designed to combine the exchange’s Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade settlement and custody across multiple networks. Proposed features include round-the-clock trading, faster settlement, stablecoin funding and fractional share ownership. The eligible universe is expected to cover Russell 1000 constituents and major index ETF constituents, matching the scope of DTCC’s tokenization service.
Several approvals and operational decisions remain outstanding. NYSE has not launched the platform, has not identified the first issuers and has not established a firm launch date. SEC approval for SR-NYSE-2026-17 does not mean tokenized securities can currently trade. Before launch, NYSE must notify member firms at least 30 days in advance, eligible firms must meet SEC, FINRA and DTC requirements, and the exchange must finish its remaining regulatory clearance work.
The announcement therefore marks an infrastructure partnership and an announced product capability, not the start of public trading. It also demonstrates that tokenized proxy voting can move beyond isolated experiments and become part of an exchange’s planned governance framework. The next tests will involve issuer adoption, legal treatment of wallet ownership, operational readiness and whether the system delivers transparency as well as a faster technical workflow. For tokenized proxy voting to earn broad confidence, those governance questions will matter as much as the chain on which the records are recorded.