£400 billion council pensions heading to crypto firm backed by Peter Thiel

Britain’s £400 billion council pension scheme will soon be administered by a crypto exchange backed by billionaire Peter Thiel.

New York-listed crypto exchange Bullish has agreed a £3.1 billion takeover of UK shareholder services giant Equiniti, the firm that runs payments, online portals and member queries for the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).

The deal, announced on Tuesday (5 May), also gives Bullish ownership of share records for around 3,000 listed companies, including Rolls-Royce and Berkshire Hathaway, covering more than 20 million verified shareholders and roughly $500 billion (about £375 billion) in annual payments.

Bullish has agreed to pay around $2.35 billion (£1.75 billion) in stock plus assume about $1.85 billion (£1.4 billion) of Equiniti debt.

What this means for pension members

Equiniti runs the LGPS administration under a contract that lasts until 2029.

Until that contract ends, former and serving local government workers drawing pensions will receive their payments through systems owned by a US crypto exchange.

Bullish has confirmed that current Equiniti chief executive Dan Kramer and his team will continue to run the business after the deal closes in January 2027.

One detail in the deal complicates the headline. Siris, Equiniti’s current private equity owner, has retained a call option to buy back parts of the business that Bullish has classified as outside its main focus, with the retirement services division flagged as a candidate.

That arrangement leaves open the possibility that the LGPS administration returns to private equity hands at a later date, though neither party has set a timeline.

The handover also carries a domestic warning. Equiniti previously administered the £200 billion Civil Service Pension Scheme until Capita took over the contract in December last year, a transition that left a backlog of 86,000 unresolved cases and tipped some retirees into financial hardship after missed payments.

Pension members watching the Bullish deal will want to know how the new owner plans to avoid a repeat.

What Bullish wants to build

Bullish plans to put Equiniti’s shareholder records onto a blockchain ledger, opening the door to share trading and settlement that runs around the clock and uses stablecoins, digital tokens designed to track the value of the US dollar.

Bullish has pitched the deal to investors as creating “the global transfer agent for tokenised securities”, with Chief Executive Tom Farley calling tokenisation the defining capital markets infrastructure trend of the next 25 years. Stablecoins now command a market worth roughly $300 billion (£225 billion) globally.

For shareholders in companies such as Rolls-Royce, the immediate practical effect is limited because Equiniti staff will continue to administer share records under existing UK regulation.

Over a longer horizon Bullish wants to issue shares as digital tokens on a single unified ledger, which would in theory let trades settle in seconds rather than the current two business days.

The London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are running similar tokenisation experiments.

Bullish, founded in 2020 by crypto entrepreneur Brendan Blumer and incorporated in the Cayman Islands, listed on the NYSE last year and raised about $1 billion in its initial public offering.

Its early backers included Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Thiel Capital, with Thiel a prominent supporter of US President Donald Trump and an ally of Vice President JD Vance.

Bullish shares rose by as much as 17% after the deal hit the wires.

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