What happened
Thomas Farley, chief executive of crypto exchange Bullish and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, said tokenized securities are on track to reach mainstream adoption within two years, according to remarks published by CryptoBriefing on Wednesday. Farley's framing puts a hard calendar on a thesis that until now has mostly been discussed in open-ended terms by TradFi executives.
He runs one of the few crypto exchanges that is itself a listed public company, having completed its NYSE debut in August 2025, which gives the forecast added weight for a traditional-markets audience. The comments did not include a specific product announcement from Bullish, but they signal where the exchange sees institutional flow moving next.
Why it matters
Tokenization has moved from pitch deck to live product over the past 18 months, with BlackRock's BUIDL money market fund, Franklin Templeton's BENJI and Ondo Finance's tokenized Treasuries each pulling institutional capital onto public and permissioned chains. A two-year path to the mainstream for tokenized equities and other securities is aggressive. It implies that custodians, transfer agents and clearinghouses solve settlement finality, KYC portability and corporate-actions handling on a compressed timeline.
The headline is the kind of statement bulls want to hear. The plumbing picture is messier. If Farley is right, exchanges that currently route order flow through the DTCC pipe face a parallel settlement layer within the same business-planning window.