Crypto Firm Bullish Hires Former NYSE President Stacey Cunningham

Bullish named Stacey Cunningham, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), as its president, the crypto exchange operator said today (Monday). The hire reunites her with CEO Tom Farley, whom she succeeded at the NYSE in 2018.

Cunningham joins six months after Bullish, which listed on the NYSE in August 2025 at $37 a share, agreed to pay $4.2 billion for Equiniti, a transfer agent serving nearly 3,000 companies that issue shares and more than 20 million shareholders.

Trading already earns Bullish less than its other businesses. Subscription, services and other revenue reached $62.7 million in the second quarter, against $29.9 million in adjusted transaction revenue.

Farley said she would help build new services for market participants and pointed to her decades of relationships with issuers, the customers Equiniti serves today.

London's trading industry is coming home!

Equiniti Is Working With Both Bullish and the NYSE

Public markets depend on trusted infrastructure, Cunningham said, and "there is an enormous opportunity to make that infrastructure more efficient, connected and accessible."

Bullish, the NYSE and Nasdaq have reached different stages with tokenized shares, digital versions of stock recorded on a blockchain .

The NYSE said in January it was building a round-the-clock tokenized venue that would need regulatory approval and has given no launch date, while Nasdaq, which asked the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in September 2025 to allow tokenized trading, won approval in March.

Bullish received approval from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission in June and began trading its own tokenized shares in August.

Equiniti appears on both sides. The NYSE named it on November 2 as one of six transfer agents signed up for the planned venue, and Cunningham still sits on the NYSE board, according to the Bullish release. The Equiniti purchase is expected to close in January, subject to regulatory approvals.

A Second Former NYSE President at Bullish

The two have worked together before. Cunningham reported to Farley as the NYSE's chief operating officer from 2015, then took over from him as president in May 2018.

"I've seen firsthand the impact of her leadership," Farley said in the statement.

She led the NYSE Group until January 2022, the first woman to do so, according to the company. Before the NYSE she held senior roles at Nasdaq.

She has worked as an operating partner at private equity firm Advent and an adviser to Uniswap Labs, and the company said she serves on the board of Cloudflare.