Nasdaq chief executive Adena Friedman told CNBC in an interview published October 9, 2026, that tokenizing collateral assets could unlock tens of billions of dollars currently immobilised within the financial system. Friedman made the remarks at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore, where tokenization and round-the-clock markets dominated discussion among exchange operators and infrastructure providers.
"If you tokenize all these instruments as well as the money flows, collateral becomes very fluid," Friedman said. She extended the logic to cash itself: "If we can tokenize money, then we can tokenize capital flows."
The comments arrive as Nasdaq advances a regulatory agenda built over the past year. The exchange filed a request with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in September 2025 seeking approval for tokenized settlement of certain securities. The SEC granted that approval on March 18, 2026, covering Russell 1000 stocks and major index ETFs. Settlement under the approved pilot remains T+1, one business day, unchanged from conventional settlement cycles, though the underlying instruments move on tokenized rails.
Nasdaq is also working toward a near-continuous trading day. The exchange has targeted December 6, 2026, to launch an overnight trading session, extending the trading day to nearly 23 hours across five days a week. A regulator approved the extended hours in April, conditional on the dissemination of nighttime pricing data. Friedman described the trajectory toward constant markets succinctly: trading "in real time, all the time."
Collateral ambitions beyond Nasdaq
Nasdaq is not alone in pursuing this infrastructure shift. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation has enrolled more than 50 institutions, including BlackRock, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, for a tokenization service expected to launch in October. A Broadridge study published in July found that 84% of 200 North American executives surveyed ranked tokenization as a strategic priority.
Friedman situated the current push within a longer regulatory arc, pointing to the Genius Act, the US stablecoin law in effect since July 2025, as groundwork for broader tokenization of financial instruments. She characterised stablecoins as "the easiest part" of the transition, suggesting that tokenizing cash was a necessary first step before the market moved to tokenize collateral and capital flows more broadly. Asked to place the United States in the global tokenization race, Friedman said Wall Street now views itself as "ten years ahead" of expectations set a decade earlier.
Kraken's stake in the trend
Nasdaq's interest in the tokenized asset space extends to a 100 million dollar investment in Kraken. Arjun Sethi, Kraken's co-CEO, cited a concrete example of demand for tokenized market access: a foreign company with 25 million dollars in revenue seeking entry to US markets through tokenization rather than a conventional listing process.
For European market participants, the developments at Nasdaq and the DTCC signal where institutional collateral management may be heading. If tokenized settlement and near-continuous trading take hold in the United States, pressure is likely to build on European exchanges and custodians to match the pace, particularly where cross-border collateral mobility and cash management are concerned.
