According to the head of the stock exchange, the American stock exchange Nasdaq treats the SEC’s approval of its proposal to offer tokenized versions of listed shares as a top priority.
“We will act as quickly as possible” – Matt Savarese, head of digital asset strategy at Nasdaq, he said during a Thursday interview with CNBC when asked whether the SEC could approve the proposal this year.
“I think what we really need to do is gauge when public comments will emerge and then respond to the SEC’s questions as they arise,” Savarese said. “We hope to engage with them as soon as possible,” Savarese said.
Savarese says Nasdaq isn’t ‘turning the system upside down’
The proposal filed by Nasdaq on September 8 aims to allow investors to buy and sell exchange tokens – digital representations of shares of publicly traded companies – on an exchange.
Asked if he expects other major exchanges to follow suit, Savarese isn’t trying to change the way stocks are invested.
“We don’t intend to turn the system upside down; we want everyone to come along for the ride and make tokenization more mainstream,” he said.
“We want to do this first in a responsible, investor-led way, consistent with SEC rules themselves,” he added.
It wasn’t until October that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev he said that tokenization “will ultimately engulf the entire financial system.”
The cryptocurrency industry is divided on the issue of tokenized stocks
Savarese emphasized Nasdaq’s desire to be an innovator in the ecosystem, noting that the exchange was the first to transition markets from paper trading to electronic systems.
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Tokenizing shares was one of the most critical topics of conversation in the cryptocurrency industry this year.
On September 3, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz he said the company became the first Nasdaq-listed company to tokenize its capital on the main blockchain after its launch on the Solana network.
The conversation around tokenized stocks has also drawn skepticism from the cryptocurrency industry.
On October 1, Rob Hadick, general partner at cryptocurrency firm Dragonfly, told Cointelegraph that tokenized stocks would provide a significant benefit to conventional markets, but may not be a boon to the cryptocurrency industry as others had predicted.
Hadick said that if tokenized stocks utilize a Layer 2 network, it creates a “leakage” in value and may not flow back into Ethereum or the broader crypto ecosystem as much as expected.
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