Nasdaq’s president says the SEC’s new crypto stance is letting markets ‘build’ again
Nasdaq’s Tal Cohen said a friendlier SEC is giving crypto firms and exchanges room to experiment with tokenization and digital market infrastructure.
What to know:
- Nasdaq President Tal Cohen said a more proactive and constructive stance from the SEC is giving market operators new freedom to experiment with blockchain infrastructure and tokenized assets.
- Cohen said Nasdaq is investing in “always on” market infrastructure, tokenization and artificial intelligence as it works to converge traditional financial rails with digital asset systems.
- He cited interoperability between legacy and digital platforms as a key hurdle, and said Nasdaq is testing AI-driven simulations of its matching engine to model stress scenarios and support longer trading hours.
“The gray zone four years ago was a no-fly zone,” Cohen said. “The gray zone now is we can build. We can gain some scale. We can experiment without maybe any brush back.”
Cohen described a broader shift inside financial markets toward “always on” trading systems that operate nearly around the clock and move money, securities and collateral faster than traditional infrastructure.
Nasdaq, which provides trading technology to more than 130 markets globally, is investing in blockchain infrastructure, tokenization and artificial intelligence as part of that transition, Cohen said.
“We’re embracing two trends,” he said. “Always on market infrastructure” and “convergence” between traditional financial rails and digital asset systems.
Cohen said interoperability between those systems remains one of the largest hurdles for the industry. Firms do not want to operate separate infrastructures for traditional securities and tokenized assets, he said.
