Broadridge Financial Solutions, the firm that processes $8 trillion in tokenized assets monthly and generates over 7 billion investor communications annually, announced on April 6, 2026 the extension of its governance platform to on-chain tokenized equities. Three weeks later, on April 28, Ondo F...
Broadridge Financial Solutions, the firm that processes $8 trillion in tokenized assets monthly and generates over 7 billion investor communications annually, announced on April 6, 2026 the extension of its governance platform to on-chain tokenized equities. Three weeks later, on April 28, Ondo Finance integrated Broadridge's ProxyVote system across its $700 million tokenized stock and ETF platform, covering 250+ securities and tens of thousands of holders. Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY), the first U.S. public company to issue native tokenized equity on a major public blockchain, will conduct its May 2026 annual shareholder vote through the system.
These moves address a structural deficiency in the tokenized securities market: tokens that represent equity ownership have, until now, lacked the corporate governance infrastructure — proxy voting, regulatory filings access, corporate action processing — that underpins traditional equity markets. The tokenized stock market has grown from $32 million to over $1.1 billion in roughly 12 months, a nearly 2,900% increase, but without governance rails, these tokens functioned as price-tracking instruments rather than full equity substitutes.
A tokenized stock that cannot vote in a shareholder meeting is functionally a derivative, not equity. This distinction matters for institutional adoption, regulatory classification, and long-term market structure.
Traditional equity ownership conveys a bundle of rights: voting power in shareholder meetings, access to proxy statements and SEC filings, participation in corporate actions such as dividends and splits, and legal standing as a beneficial owner. Prior to Broadridge's April 2026 announcement, none of the major tokenized equity platforms — Ondo Global Markets, xStocks, or Backed Finance — offered integrated proxy voting or regulatory filings access. Holders received price exposure and on-chain transferability, but not the governance functions that define equity ownership in regulated capital markets.
The SEC-CFTC Joint Interpretation issued on March 17, 2026 established a five-category token taxonomy distinguishing digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins, and digital securities. Under this framework, tokenized stocks that lack governance functions could face classification ambiguity: if a token does not confer the rights of the underlying security, its status as a "digital security" becomes less clear. Adding governance infrastructure removes this ambiguity.
Broadridge's platform, announced April 6, 2026, extends its existing proxy voting infrastructure — which already handles the shareholder communications and voting mechanics for a significant portion of publicly traded U.S. equities — to tokenized assets.
The system supports three categories of participants:
Tim Gokey, CEO of Broadridge, stated: "Ensuring accurate, scalable, and cost-effective governance has never been more critical to supporting the growth of tokenized equities."
The platform consolidates voting across registered, beneficial, and tokenized holdings into a single view for issuers. This "single pane of glass" approach means a company like Galaxy Digital can see and tally votes from shareholders holding traditional brokerage shares alongside those holding on-chain GLXY tokens through a unified interface. Corporate secretaries and transfer agents do not need separate workflows for tokenized and non-tokenized holders.
On April 28, 2026, Ondo Finance announced the integration of Broadridge's ProxyVote system into its Global Markets platform. According to CoinDesk, Ondo now commands approximately 70% market share in tokenized equities, with over $700 million in total value locked across 250+ tokenized stocks and ETFs and tens of thousands of asset holders.
The integration enables Ondo token holders to:
Broadridge has integrated Web3 authentication into ProxyVote, allowing investors to sign in through their crypto wallets rather than requiring traditional brokerage credentials. This is a notable concession by a legacy financial infrastructure provider: rather than forcing crypto-native users into traditional authentication workflows, Broadridge adapted its system to accept wallet-based identity.
Matthieu de Vergnes, Ondo's Global Head of Institutional, stated the integration delivers "all the benefits of being onchain — freely transferable, compatible with DeFi — and on top of that, you get the governance that you have from the underlying."
Danielle Gurrieri, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Management at Broadridge, said the system will "really go a long way in making the tokenized world more scalable, giving that level of trust to end investors."
The current scope covers non-U.S. investors holding Ondo's tokenized equities. U.S. regulatory requirements for tokenized stock governance remain subject to ongoing rulemaking, though the SEC-CFTC Joint Interpretation and the pending CLARITY Act may provide additional clarity.
Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) will be the first major U.S. public company to conduct an on-chain shareholder vote, scheduled for its annual meeting in May 2026. Galaxy tokenized its equity on Solana, with eligible shareholders who hold tokenized GLXY through Superstate able to cast proxy votes through Broadridge's infrastructure.
Mike Novogratz, Galaxy's CEO, framed the move in infrastructure terms: "We've long believed that tokenization will reshape capital markets, and this is a meaningful step towards a tokenized equity market. With Broadridge, we're combining the credibility of traditional market infrastructure with the advantages of blockchain to deliver a more efficient model for shareholders."
The pilot tests a specific hypothesis: whether blockchains can reduce reconciliation steps, improve vote transparency, and provide investors with faster confirmation that companies have received their voting instructions. Traditional proxy voting involves multiple intermediaries — transfer agents, proxy solicitors, depositories, and custodian banks — each adding processing time and potential points of failure. On-chain voting could compress this chain.
Broadridge built its tokenized governance platform on a dedicated Avalanche Layer 1 (L1) blockchain powered by Ava Cloud. The architectural choice is notable: rather than deploying on an existing public chain, Broadridge opted for a purpose-built L1 that integrates with its existing backend infrastructure.
The flow works as follows:
This cross-chain approach means a company with tokenized equity on Solana (like Galaxy) and tokenized stocks on Ondo (which operates across multiple chains) can have all votes settled through a single Broadridge L1 and then reconciled across the relevant chains. The architecture does not require issuers to migrate their tokenized assets to Avalanche.
It is worth noting that this architecture introduces a centralized intermediary — Broadridge's L1 — into what are otherwise decentralized asset rails. The governance layer is permissioned and operated by Broadridge, not by an open validator set. This tradeoff is consistent with the nature of the service: corporate proxy voting is inherently a regulated, intermediated process, and Broadridge's existing role as the dominant proxy infrastructure provider in traditional markets makes it the natural operator for this function on-chain.
The tokenized equities market has grown from approximately $32 million in January 2025 to over $1.1 billion by April 2026 — a roughly 2,900% increase in 15 months. According to CoinDesk, the market for tokenized equities exploded by nearly 3,000% in a single year, driven by platforms including Ondo Global Markets, xStocks, and Backed Finance.
Key market metrics as of April 2026:
For context, the broader RWA tokenization market has surged 66% to $23.6 billion in 2026, according to DefiLlama data. Tokenized stocks remain a small fraction — roughly 4.7% — of the total tokenized asset universe, but the category's growth rate outpaces all other RWA segments.
Broadridge's existing operations provide scale context: the company processes $15 trillion in daily average trading volume across tokenized and traditional securities globally, employs over 15,000 associates across 21 countries, and generates approximately $6.5 billion in annual revenue.
From an economic value distribution perspective, Broadridge's entry into on-chain governance creates a new fee layer in the tokenized securities stack. In traditional markets, proxy voting and corporate action processing are embedded in the overall custody and clearing cost structure, often charged as per-position or per-communication fees.
The on-chain extension of this service introduces several economic dynamics:
Fee capture: Broadridge will extract governance-processing fees from tokenized security issuers, adding a cost layer that did not previously exist for on-chain assets. The pricing model has not been publicly disclosed, but traditional proxy processing fees range from $0.25-$1.50 per position per meeting, depending on volume.
Infrastructure lock-in: By establishing its Avalanche L1 as the governance settlement layer, Broadridge creates switching costs for issuers and platforms. Once a tokenized equity uses Broadridge for proxy voting, migrating to a competitor requires re-establishing the full corporate action infrastructure.
Subsidy dynamics: Ondo has not disclosed whether it absorbs governance costs or passes them to token holders. If absorbed, this represents another operational cost in a tokenized equity business that already faces margin pressure from custody, compliance, and market-making expenses. The $700 million TVL generates unknown fee revenue; whether governance costs are sustainable at this scale is an open question.
Regulatory moat: The SEC-CFTC framework implicitly favors tokenized securities that preserve traditional shareholder rights. Platforms that integrate governance infrastructure may receive more favorable regulatory treatment, creating a competitive advantage that functions as a regulatory moat.
The Broadridge-Ondo-Galaxy trifecta represents a structural upgrade to the tokenized securities market, not a feature announcement. Tokenized stocks without governance rights are price-tracking tokens. Tokenized stocks with proxy voting, filings access, and corporate action processing are equity instruments that happen to settle on a blockchain.
Whether this matters at $1.1 billion in tokenized equities is debatable. Whether it matters when the market reaches $10 billion or $100 billion is not. Institutional allocators, regulated funds, and fiduciary-bound managers cannot hold equity instruments that lack governance rights. By solving the governance gap, Broadridge removes one of the structural barriers to institutional adoption of tokenized equity markets.
The open question is cost. Broadridge's entry adds an intermediary fee layer to an asset class that markets itself on disintermediation. If governance processing costs are $0.50-$1.50 per position per meeting at scale, the economic impact on small retail holders of tokenized fractional shares could be proportionally larger than for institutional holders of large positions. The market will determine whether the governance premium justifies the cost.
For now, a token that can vote is worth more than one that cannot. The market just received the infrastructure to prove it.