Nasdaq Autonomous 2026 Future of Commerce Symposium

We appreciate your time. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for having me, by the way. Hopefully lunch was not heavy and people got caffeinated so we can have some excitement here. Everything you described is us building towards an always-on world, where we are trying to increase access for investors. We are trying to provide investors with choice, and we are doing it under a well-regulated umbrella. All of those activities you just mentioned, and there are just four activities, but there are many more that we are undertaking, allows us to really embrace all the possibilities and all the opportunities that come with always-on.

Yeah. It is really interesting. The U.S. equity markets, as you noted, just about 10% of it happens after 4:00 P.M. and before 9:30 A.M. in the morning, and the majority of that happens between 4:00 A.M. and 9:30 A.M. Nasdaq today is open 16 hours a day. We open up at 4:00 A.M., we close at 8:00 P.M., so we are not a 9:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. operation today. We are 16 hours. What is interesting is in the hours that we are closed, as you said, there is not a lot of volume. It is, let's call it 1% or 2%. What we envision, I should say, is when you provide an exchange that has the resilience, the operational excellence, the transparency that gets investors and regulators comfortable with trading, we expect that to be a larger percentage of the overall ADV number one. More of that ADV will be executed on exchange.

It is executed today off exchange. There are a lot of OTC facilities that are available to you, or OTC channels that are available to you today. I think we will unlock latent demand, and it will be gradual. It will happen over time. There is also a flywheel that comes with being 23/5, which I hope we have an opportunity to talk about, because there is the data side of it, the financial technology side of it, the asset servicing side of it, the collateral side of it. Most people see just the trading side of it, and what we see is a much, much bigger picture and a grow-the-pie opportunity.

What is the benefit? What you're referring to is the Nasdaq Equity Token.

It's really important if you put it in the context of the Innovation Exemption that came out. The Innovation Exemption that just came out from the SEC talks about a few very important things. One is it's got to be issuer sponsored. Two is it's got to be a one-to-one backing conveying the full economic and governance interest of that security. Right? Three is anybody can really become a TSV. It is not just DeFi or CeFi or something like that. Okay. So we have the Nasdaq Equity Token. We were the first ones to go out there and said it should be issuer sponsored, issuer centric, so the programmability and the composability of what we've built into our token have the attributes that issuers care about, which is proxy, corporate actions, dividends.

It's really, really important for us that your rights and your protections travel with you, and that is the one thing that we're providing, which is there's many forms of tokenization. There's many forms of tokenization that don't require issuer sponsorship. We have not taken that route. One is we're trying to make sure there's more connectivity between issuers and investors, which has not been part of the tokenization story to date. We need to create more engagement between issuers and investors on that. Two is we want to make sure that while we pursue innovation, we're not sacrificing, compromising market quality, market integrity, or investor protections. That is what really differentiates the Nasdaq Equity Token.