Today the NASDAQ announced the launch of its SaaS based Marketplace Services platform that aims to make it easier for its clients to issue, trade and manage the lifecycle of digital and tokenized assets.
Last week, the exchange giant Nasdaq announced the launch of its SaaS based digital asset suite named the Marketplace Services platform.
As the exchange giant is best known for its technology oriented public stock market exchange, one would be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that the company is getting into the business of operating a virtual currency exchange.
While Nasdaq is not launching a virtual currency exchange, it is rolling out a service which will empower companies across a range of industries to build new financial instrument that use Distributed Ledger Technology — a version of blockchain technology that more closely meets the needs of financial services.
Mature Organizations With Large Client Bases Now Backing Blockchain
What separates this from the usual announcements around adoption of blockchain is that it involves mature companies with large corporate clients coming together to offer what has been up to now seen as an interesting-abeit-immature technology that many believed was still many years away from large scale adoption.
That established companies such as Nasdaq and Microsoft are now backing blockchain and offering it to their clients is a signal that the technology has now become adopted by the mainstream. The client base of the two organizations alone is large before considering the footprint of Nasdaq DLT partners, R3 and Symbiont, which are both becoming the de-facto standard for Distributed Ledger Technology in financial services.
Nasdaq itself has a huge presence in the world of financial infrastructure today; the exchange giant has over 120 financial services clients across the world. Through its partnership with Microsoft, Nasdaq will be able to distribute its Marketplace Services platform through the software company’s Azure cloud offering, which used by most of the companies in the SP&P 500 and is available in 140 countries worldwide.
Hiding The Blockchain In The Back
Nasdaq has paid particular attention to the user experience in order to make blockchain more useable by financial professionals; historically doing anything in blockchain has required an engineering degree. By pushing technical aspects concerning the underlying blockchain plumbing infrastructure to behind the scenes, it has freed up users to focus on their core strength of being financial experts.
That metamorphosis from being a service that is highly technical, to one that abstracts the technology to offer an experience that a consumer is comfortable with is one that we have seen with the evolution of the Internet which used to be only the domain of bedroom coders but is now ubiquitous in everyday life. It’s a good sign of a technology that has become mature.
For Nasdaq, that move away from the technical is also paying dividends because it makes the value proposition of blockchain a lot easier for business leaders to understand, as Johan Toll, head of digital assets within the company’s markets technology division, which owns the platform, explains — ”The discussion has primarily turned from being a technology oriented one between technologists into one with the business, which is encouraging because that’s where the real money and the real interest will come from to motivate a transformation of the ecosystem.”
Aren’t Assets Digital Already?
The term “digital assets”, while somewhat confusing given that most financial assets exist in digital form and have done since the 1970’s, has emerged as a financial services shorthand to refer to financial instruments that are represented in computer code via “smart-contracts” and stored on a distributed ledger that is shared across multiple financial entities.
