Nasdaq chief executive Adena Friedman told CNBC that tokenization of traditional securities could release tens of billions of dollars in capital currently trapped by settlement delays and collateral requirements. The comment arrives as U.S. equity markets complete their first year under T+1 settlement rules and as the largest custodians—State Street, BNY Mellon—pilot tokenized treasury repos with private blockchain consortia.
Friedman's thesis centers on two frictions. First, the gap between trade execution and settlement forces institutions to hold extra cash against unsettled positions. Second, collateral posted in one silo cannot move freely to meet margin calls elsewhere. Tokenization compresses settlement to minutes and allows a single tokenized asset to serve multiple uses simultaneously through programmable custody. Nasdaq has run blockchain trials with Citi and Fidelity since 2022; those experiments suggest 15-25 basis points in cost reduction for cross-border equity trades and a 40-60 percent cut in collateral tied up overnight.
The unlock matters because balance sheet is expensive. A large pension fund running $80 billion in assets might hold $2-3 billion in cash purely to cover settlement timing risk. Prime brokers keep another $5-10 billion in treasury collateral that could otherwise back leveraged positions. If tokenization lets institutions redeploy even 20 percent of that buffer, the freed capital flows into alpha-generating strategies or reduces financing cost. The second-order effect is velocity: when the same dollar can settle four trades in a day instead of one, market depth improves and bid-ask spreads tighten. That benefits long-duration allocators who rebalance quarterly but pay the spread every time.
The infrastructure is already live in private markets. Hamilton Lane tokenized $50 million of secondary fund stakes in 2023; KKR and Apollo run tokenized NAV facilities for wealth clients who cannot meet the $5 million traditional minimums. The public-market leap requires regulatory clarity and interoperability across custodians. The SEC has not yet issued formal guidance on whether a tokenized equity share is a security, a commodity, or both. That ambiguity keeps the bulge brackets in pilot mode. Meanwhile, MAS in Singapore and the Monetary Authority of Hong Kong have published tokenization frameworks that treat on-chain equities as functionally identical to book-entry shares, which explains why Nasdaq and SGX are running joint trials in Asia before scaling in New York.
Allocators should watch three events in the next six to nine months: the SEC's response to Fidelity's application to custody tokenized treasuries for retail accounts, the first Nasdaq-listed REIT to issue shares directly on a blockchain ledger, and the publication of ISDA's standardized smart-contract language for tokenized derivatives. Each event removes a legal or operational excuse for inaction. Pension systems and sovereign wealth funds that wait for full regulatory certainty will enter late and pay higher fees to third-party tokenization platforms.
Friedman did not name a dollar figure for Nasdaq's own tokenization revenue opportunity, but the exchange earned $740 million from market technology licensing in 2023. If tokenization becomes the new rails, Nasdaq sells the switches.
The takeaway
Tokenization could free tens of billions in institutional capital by collapsing settlement windows and enabling programmable collateral reuse across multiple strategies.
Editorial & Disclosure Notice: This article was written with artificial intelligence from public sources and is published without individual human review. Artificial intelligence and other digital tools are also used for research, analysis, editing, formatting, and production. Errors, omissions, outdated information, or inaccuracies may occur. References to companies, brands, products, services, organizations, or individuals are for informational and editorial purposes and do not imply endorsement, sponsorship, affiliation, partnership, or approval unless expressly stated. All trademarks and other intellectual property remain the property of their respective owners. Opinions, analysis, estimates, and commentary are informational only and should not be construed as financial, investment, legal, tax, medical, procurement, or other professional advice. Information may be corrected, clarified, or updated after publication. Corrections or removal requests: jenny@pops4.com.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.