Broadridge Extends Governance to Tokenized Equities
The firm behind 80% of U.S. proxy votes brings corporate governance onchain, starting with Galaxy.
Louis Tellier
April 16, 2026
What happened: Last week, Broadridge Financial Solutions, the dominant infrastructure provider behind U.S. corporate governance, expanded its services to support tokenized equities, starting with proxy voting. Galaxy Digital, the first U.S. public company to tokenize SEC-registered equity on a major blockchain, will be the first to use the system for its annual shareholder meeting in May.
Why it matters: A few weeks ago, tokenized equities crossed $1 billion in market value, up roughly 2,900% year-over-year. Yet most of that market still consists of synthetic or wrapped products that offer economic exposure without voting rights or dividends, turning most of today’s tokenized equities into second-class instruments.
“The primary challenge we looked to solve was to ensure that investors investing in tokenized equities have the same rights as those that hold traditional equities,” Robert Krugman, Chief Digital Officer at Broadridge, told Blockstories.
The three tokenization models for equities, compared.
Cost savings potential: The stakes go beyond investor rights. According to a DTCC report, corporate actions cost the industry an estimated $58 billion per year, with 46% of the underlying data still processed manually. A standardized onchain source could unlock up to $15 billion in savings.
Why Broadridge: Broadridge is uniquely positioned to address this gap. The firm processes more than 80% of U.S. beneficial proxy votes and has operated blockchain infrastructure for over a decade, with its tokenized repo platform on the Canton Network alone processing between $350 and $375 billion in daily transactions. Work on governance for tokenized equities specifically began three and a half years ago, well before companies like Galaxy started putting shares onchain.
Proxy voting as starting point: That groundwork now underpins Broadridge’s first governance solution for tokenized equities, targeting the most complex corporate action to replicate onchain.
“Unlike a simple dividend distribution, you need to clearly identify who is voting, the amount they hold as of an entitlement date, ensure they receive the relevant information, and then enable them to make a decision,” noted the Broadridge Chief Digital Officer.
How the solution works: To determine voting eligibility, Broadridge takes a snapshot of the blockchain at the record date. That snapshot produces a list of all wallets holding shares at that exact moment, along with their respective positions. This onchain data is then fed into Broadridge’s existing proxy platform, which already handles the company’s traditional shareholders.
What the investors see: Investors are notified via email to participate in the vote. To vote, they connect their crypto wallet to the platform, where the system verifies holdings against the snapshot, authenticates ownership through a cryptographic signature, and records the vote on a private Avalanche-based Layer-1 managed by Broadridge. The results are delivered to the issuer in near real time.
“As of today, holders receive an email after connecting to the platform. But the goal is to deliver notifications directly to their wallet. We are already working on this with several wallet providers,” Aman Mundra, Vice President of Enterprise Innovation at Broadridge.
Hybrid by design: The solution is built to work across both traditional and tokenized shares, giving issuers a single platform to manage all shareholders. This matters because the transition will be gradual.
“The reality is we’re going to be sitting in an environment where you have traditional shares and tokenized shares sitting side by side,” explained Krugman. “What you want to do is simplify that model for the issuer, so they don’t have to go to two different platforms to capture their votes.”
Remaining challenges: For now, the solution supports natively tokenized shares like Galaxy’s. The goal is to cover all emerging models.
“There’s no standard yet for what represents a tokenized equity. There are a multitude of tokenization models emerging,” said Krugman.
Roadmap: Beyond covering all tokenization models, Broadridge plans to bring additional corporate actions onchain, including tender offers, stock splits, and distributions. Long-term, the goal is to encode these rights directly into smart contracts so governance becomes native to the asset rather than layered on top of it.
“Smart contracts are the superpower of tokenized assets. As we start to codify corporate action rights within the smart contract of the asset, that becomes really compelling,” concluded Mundra.
Carlos Domingo is the Founder and CEO of Securitize, which has emerged as one of the most active players in institutional tokenization. The company has already tokenized nearly $4 billion in assets and works with firms such as BlackRock, Apollo, and BNY Mellon.
How do you expect the fragmentation around tokenized equity standards to evolve in the years ahead?
In the near term, fragmentation is inevitable, and unfortunately we’re already seeing it.
Today, you can find multiple versions of the same stock represented in different ways across platforms: some issuer-backed, others synthetic or derivative-based. That’s a natural phase in the development of any new market structure.
But over time, markets converge toward standards. We saw this with electronic trading, with clearing systems, and with the internet itself.
For tokenized equities, the convergence will come around models that preserve what matters most: legal ownership, investor rights, and regulatory clarity. The market will ultimately favor structures that are trusted by issuers, regulators, and institutions: technically efficient, while also being legally sound.