Stacey Cunningham, who Bullish says was the first woman to lead NYSE Group, the company behind the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), is the new president of crypto exchange operator Bullish, the company announced on Monday. She stepped into that NYSE role in 2018 as the successor to Tom Farley, now Bullish’s chief executive, who had run NYSE Group since 2014.
The announcement did not give a start date, a reporting line or pay terms. Farley said in the release that Cunningham “will play a central role in building the next generation of services for market participants,” and called her “one of the most respected leaders in global capital markets.”
Cunningham has advised Uniswap Labs, the developer behind the Uniswap trading protocol, and sits on the boards of the NYSE, Cloudflare and a Georgetown University financial markets center. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the NYSE’s parent, named Lynn Martin to succeed her as president in December 2021. Before she became president, Cunningham was the NYSE’s chief operating officer, and Bullish credits her senior roles there with overseeing the modernization of the exchange’s technology and folding several acquired exchanges into its operations. Earlier on, she worked in senior positions at Nasdaq.
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Why an Exchange Veteran
Farley tied the hire to Cunningham’s “relationships with issuers built over decades.” He has made the same pitch for Equiniti, the company Bullish is acquiring: in July he said bringing together its “deep-rooted issuer relationships” and its business keeping companies’ official shareholder registers with Bullish’s blockchain-native platform “creates something that doesn’t exist today.”
The Equiniti Deal
Bullish agreed on May 5 to buy Equiniti for $4.2 billion: $1.85 billion of Equiniti debt that Bullish will assume plus roughly $2.35 billion in Bullish shares. At the $38.48 per-share price the deal set, that stock portion works out to about 61 million Bullish shares, by Unchained’s math. Siris, which is selling Equiniti, will receive two board seats under the deal, Bullish said. Equiniti is a transfer agent, the firm a public company pays to keep its official register of who owns its stock, and Bullish says Equiniti counts nearly 3,000 issuers as clients. In July, Bullish said it had received competition clearances in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany, with other approvals still pending and closing expected in January 2027.
When the deal was announced in May, Farley framed the purchase around tokenization (recording securities such as stocks on blockchains), which he called “a once-in-a-generation shift in how capital markets operate.” Regulators in Gibraltar have approved Bullish for tokenized securities trading, and tokenized versions of Bullish’s own stock, issued with the company’s backing, already trade. Bullish owns the crypto news outlet CoinDesk.
The NYSE is working on tokenized stocks too. Equiniti was one of the transfer agents the exchange added on Nov. 2 to its planned tokenized securities venue, and on Monday Ava Labs, the company that builds the Avalanche blockchain, said that venue’s clearing firm, which settles its trades, will keep its books on Avalanche. The venue still needs regulatory approval.
“Public markets depend on trusted infrastructure, but there is an enormous opportunity to make that infrastructure more efficient, connected and accessible,” Cunningham said in the release.
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