Nasdaq has agreed to acquire LeveL Markets, operator of one of the largest alternative trading systems (ATSs) for US equities, as part of a broader strategy to build infrastructure for increasingly continuous markets, spanning traditional exchanges, alternative liquidity venues and emerging digital and tokenised assets.
The acquisition, announced this week, will bring LeveL’s institutional execution network, connecting more than 2,500 buy-side and sell-side clients, under Nasdaq ownership. LeveL currently ranks as the third-largest US ATS by volume, executing more than 7,000 symbols and processing hundreds of millions of shares each day.Nasdaq is already familiar with the business, having acquired a minority stake in LeveL in 2021 as part of an initiative to expand its presence in off-exchange equities and alternative market structures. LeveL’s volumes subsequently grew by 56% between 2024 and 2025.
The timing of the proposed acquisition comes as Nasdaq is pursuing extended trading hours for its US equities market, while simultaneously expanding its capabilities around digital assets and tokenised securities.
Towards always-on markets
Earlier this year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved Nasdaq’s proposal to extend equities trading to 23 hours a day, five days a week. The move is part of a broader industry shift towards extended-hours trading, driven in part by growing international demand for access to US securities outside conventional market hours.
For trading firms and their technology providers, however, extending the trading day is not simply a matter of keeping matching engines switched on for longer.
Moving towards 23/5 (and potentially eventually 24/7) markets has implications across the trading infrastructure stack, including connectivity, market data, liquidity management, surveillance, risk controls, resilience and operational support. Systems and processes traditionally designed around well-defined trading sessions and overnight processing windows increasingly need to operate continuously.
Nasdaq has itself characterised the development of always-on markets as an infrastructure challenge, arguing that longer trading hours require scalable technology, real-time risk management and surveillance, and greater interoperability between different parts of the market ecosystem.
The LeveL acquisition adds another component to that emerging architecture.
Rather than being simply another trading platform, LeveL provides Nasdaq with an established institutional liquidity network outside the traditional exchange model. Its ATS supports continuous crossing and a range of execution mechanisms and order types, including pegged, conditional and VWAP orders.Nasdaq therefore gains not only technology but existing liquidity, connectivity, workflows and relationships across a large institutional client base.
Building Digital Liquidity Networks
Following completion of the transaction, Nasdaq will establish a new business, Digital Liquidity Networks (DLN), which will incorporate LeveL. Led by Roland Chai, who has headed Nasdaq’s digital assets strategy since early this year, DLN will bring together the company’s existing capabilities and investments in digital assets and market modernisation.
The unit appears designed to address a market environment in which liquidity increasingly exists beyond conventional exchange order books and where the boundaries between traditional securities infrastructure and newer digital market models are becoming less distinct.
“Digital assets, tokenized instruments and new forms of market infrastructure are expressions of a broader, accelerating transformation of the architecture of capital markets themselves, one designed to make markets more continuous and accessible across asset classes, geographies, and financial instruments,” said Chai.
Rather than treating extended-hours trading, alternative liquidity and digital assets as separate developments, Nasdaq is increasingly positioning them as elements of the same structural change: the emergence of markets that operate for longer, connect more types of liquidity and support a broader range of asset representations and trading models.
Tokenisation enters the architecture
Tokenisation is another component of that strategy. Nasdaq has been developing a model under which tokenised equities and exchange-traded products could trade through existing regulated market infrastructure. Rather than creating a separate marketplace for blockchain-based versions of securities, its approach is intended to allow conventional and tokenised forms of the same security to operate within the existing market framework.
In this model, tokenisation becomes less about creating a parallel crypto market and more about adding new issuance, ownership and settlement mechanisms to established capital-markets infrastructure. Combined with the move towards longer trading hours and the expansion into alternative liquidity through LeveL, the strategy points towards a market architecture in which exchanges, ATSs and potentially tokenised markets coexist within a more interconnected liquidity ecosystem. Nasdaq is clearly positioning itself to provide infrastructure across those boundaries.
“We believe the coming decade will bring meaningful changes to market structure,” said Chai. “We see a significant opportunity to help shape that future.”
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