This week, Forbes reported that Nasdaq, the second largest stock exchange in the world, has approved seven different cryptocurrency exchanges to work with their proprietary surveillance technology, which is reportedly designed to prevent fraud and market manipulation.
Nasdaq’s head of exchange and regulatory surveillance team, Tony Sio, was only ready to reveal the names of two of those exchanges, Gemini and SBI Virtual Currency, each of whom already publicized their involvement with Nasdaq last year. However, Sio did give some clues as to the types of guidelines that exchanges will need to follow. Sio explained:
“Historically, we don’t do such a large vetting process for our clients because they are much more well-known. But as we started working with less well-known names, startups, then we realized we needed to do this check process.”
Sio indicated in the interview that Nasdaq will have a preference for working with established exchanges who are fully compliant with US financial regulations, including KYC and AML measures that are controversial among many privacy advocates. The most unique qualification required by Nasdaq is that the exchanges are open about their listing process, to avoid the type of pay-to-play scenario that has long been suspected of many crypto exchanges. Sio said:
“The objective that we’re trying to work with crypto, is we see this as a growing asset class. So we’re working to help provide our technology, it could be around matching, it could be around surveillance, to help our customers as they grow their marketplaces.”
Just before the start of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, Adena Friedman, the President, and CEO of Nasdaq called the invention of cryptocurrency “a tremendous demonstration of genius and creativity.” Friedman also alluded to the work that Nasdaq is doing with crypto exchanges. Friedman said:
“At Nasdaq, we are working to help cryptocurrencies gain investors’ trust by offering our technology for trade matching, clearing, and trade integrity to start-up exchanges.”
Last week, CryptoGlobe reported that Nasdaq was part of a $20 million dollar investment, along with CitiBank and others, to fund the development of blockchain technologies.
