Wall Street’s biggest exchanges are embracing digital assets by aiming to put the $126 trillion equity market on blockchains — but they are not going at it alone; rather, they are relying on crypto exchanges to get there.

Over the past week, two of the world’s most powerful exchange operators — Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange — teamed up with digital asset exchanges to merge equities with blockchains through tokenization.

Nasdaq is developing a framework that would allow publicly listed companies to issue blockchain-based versions of their shares while preserving traditional ownership rights and governance. To distribute those tokenized stocks globally, the exchange…