In a strategic move to support its embryonic digital assets initiatives, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is partnering with crypto infrastructure powerhouse Blockchain.com to make tokenised equities and ETFs available to the latter’s 44 million verified retail users across 70+ jurisdictions. The tokenised products will be traded on the NYSE’s upcoming digital assets ATS, which is due to go live towards the end of this year.
“Tokenised stocks are one of the most impactful advancements in the modern financial landscape, and a key catalyst for greater economic freedom,” says Peter Smith, Executive Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Blockchain.com. “People shouldn’t be limited in owning stocks based on where they happen to live, or the brokerage and information they may or may not have access to. Connecting to the NYSE digital ATS will enable us to extend the opportunity to invest in these digital assets to tens of millions of Blockchain.com users around the world.”
While the collaboration offers Blockchain.com the ability to offer 24/7/365 global stock trading on a fractional basis to its crypto-native retail investors and institutional customers, the strategic implications for the NYSE go deeper than a simple distribution arrangement.
Rather than waiting for crypto capital to gradually migrate toward TradFi brokerages, the NYSE is embedding its investment products directly into the networks where digital liquidity already lives. “The future of capital markets belongs to institutions that unite the trust of traditional finance with the innovation and accessibility of digital assets,” says Lynn Martin, President of the NYSE Group. “Blockchain.com’s international footprint and digital asset expertise make it a natural complement to our tokenised securities platform upon launch.”Built on its existing high-speed Pillar matching engine, the NYSE’s digital ATS is designed to support stablecoin funding and on-chain settlement. Importantly, and in alignment with regulatory requirements, the exchange will ensure that its tokenised stocks grant holders the same rights as traditional shares, including dividend payments and voting rights.
The partnership also includes a bidirectional market data distribution agreement between the two parties. The NYSE’s affiliate, ICE Data Services, plans to ingest and distribute Blockchain.com’s crypto market analytics to its institutional subscribers. Concurrently, Blockchain.com will integrate NYSE and ICE real-time equity feeds directly into its retail app.
The deal with Blockchain.com is the latest alliance that the NYSE has formed with a crypto and digital assets technology provider. Other collaborations that have been announced involve OKX, Securitize and tZERO. Additionally, at Ava Labs’ recent Avalanche Summit, Michael Blaugrund, VP of Strategic Initiatives at NYSE’s parent ICE, noted that the NYSE has been “very engaged” with the Ava Labs team and is “looking very carefully” at Avalanche as a platform for the on-chain settlement component of the NYSE’s digital assets solution.
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