Nasdaq Stock Market is ready turning into cryptocurrency exchange, CEO declares
Resulting from the last events, Nasdaq is open to turning into a platform for trading cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, according to the company’s CEO.
On Wednesday Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman told CNBC’s Squawk Box “Certainly Nasdaq would consider becoming a crypto exchange over time. If we do look at it and say ‘it’s time, people are ready for a more regulated market,’ for something that provides a fair experience for investors.”
A key obstacle for Nasdaq and other organizational investors is regulation, which, according to Friedman, needs to be smoothed before the company would fill the exchange. However it was optimistic on the future of digital assets.
“I believe that digital currencies will continue to persist it’s just a matter of how long it will take for that space to mature,” Friedman said.
Certainly Nasdaq would consider,”Once you look at it and say, ‘do we want to provide a regulated market for this?’
At the same time, the Nasdaq is maintaining already existing cryptoexchanges.
The company announced a partnership with the Cryptocurrency Exchange Gemini, establishef by the bitcon investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The agreement provides Gemini access to Nasdaq’s monitoring technology to garuantee that the Platform provides a fair and “rule-based market” for its own participants. The folowing statement has been mentioned in the record of Gemini CEO Tyler Winklewoss.
Whereas Friedman was optimistic about the future of cryptocurrencies. “ICOs need to be regulated,” she said. “The SEC is right that those are securities and need to be regulated as such.”
The US Securities and Exchange Commission considered ICO fraud in 2018 and stated in March that it seeks to apply securities laws to everything from crypto exchanges to digital asset storage companies known as wallets. SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said that watchdog devotes “a significant amount of resources” to the ICO market.
More than 1300-percent growth in prices for bitcoins last year certainly attracted regulators attention. Before having the worst first quarter in history, dropping 48 percent in the first three months of this year bitcoin approached $ 20,000 in December. The cryptocurrency recovered above $ 9,000 this week and peaked at $ 9,746.82 Wednesday, according to CoinDesk. The Digital Currency has grown by about 20 percent this week.
