Overview
Proxy voting and shareholder communications are among the least modernized parts of public capital markets. Investor communications pass through layers of custodians and intermediaries, ballots are frequently reconciled manually, and an individual shareholder has little practical means of confirming that a vote was recorded and counted correctly. The problem is not the ballot but the chain of records behind it. Moving that infrastructure onchain gives every step, from communication to ballot to recorded vote, a single shared and auditable record.
Why Proxy Infrastructure Has Been Slow to Modernize
Public company shareholder records pass through multiple layers: the company, its transfer agent, custodians, and the brokers holding shares on behalf of individual investors. A shareholder vote travels back up that same chain, which introduces reconciliation risk at every layer and leaves a gap between the investor's belief that a vote was cast and the issuer's record of it being counted. Because the infrastructure was built decades ago and serves nearly every public company simultaneously, replacing it outright is not practical. The requirement is extension to tokenized securities, not duplication.
How Onchain Governance Infrastructure Solves This
When equity is tokenized, proxy materials and ballots are delivered directly to a shareholder's digital wallet, and votes are submitted and recorded onchain. That produces a single auditable record and removes the reconciliation step between custodian, broker, and issuer systems. The approach does not replace existing proxy infrastructure but extends it, so that an issuer tokenizing equity plugs into the governance rails already serving traditional shareholders rather than standing up a separate voting system for tokenized shares.
Proxy Voting Infrastructure on Avalanche
Broadridge, which underpins the daily average trading of more than $15 trillion in equities, fixed income, and other securities, sends more than 7 billion investor communications annually and runs the proxy voting system used by most US public companies. In April 2026, Broadridge extended its ProxyVote platform to support tokenized equities on a dedicated Avalanche L1. Galaxy Digital, the first US public company to issue native tokenized equity on a major public blockchain, became the first to use it at its May 2026 annual meeting, where holders of tokenized GLXY shares received proxy materials and submitted ballots directly through their digital wallets, with votes recorded on the L1.
Because ProxyVote already serves essentially every major US public company, the extension means any issuer that tokenizes equity can plug into the same governance rails without building new systems. Broadridge's Distributed Ledger Repo platform separately processes more than $357 billion per day in tokenized repo transactions, which indicates the scale of institutional infrastructure already running through the same network.
What This Means for Your Company
For a public company, transfer agent, or governance services provider, extending proxy infrastructure onchain gives tokenized equity holders the same governance rights and voting mechanics as traditional shareholders, without the organization maintaining a parallel voting system. As tokenized equities scale, the proxy and corporate actions layer scales with them, on infrastructure that already serves the majority of public companies.
The governance rails are extended; the shareholder base that uses them is not yet built. One annual meeting, at one issuer, has run through the tokenized path, and the volume that would test it at scale sits in repo rather than in equity. Broadridge already holds the record for most of the market. What tokenization changes is the wallet the ballot arrives in.