The exchange giant joins Fidelity and BNY Mellon in pursuit of their own cryptocurrency custody platform.
Nasdaq, a US stock exchange headquartered in New York City, is said to be looking forward to the second quarter of 2023 to release its custody services for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
in interview With Bloomberg, Ira Auerbach, Nasdaq’s senior vice president and head of digital assets, said Nasdaq is “moving forward to get all the necessary technical infrastructure and regulatory approvals in place.”
The report describes an infrastructure that may look similar to that of Fidelity Digital Assets, which quietly opened its operations to the public last week. The first step to trading bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on NASDAQ will be the Asset Custody Service.
According to a Bloomberg report, “Nasdaq has applied to the New York Department of Financial Services for a charter of a limited-purpose trust company, which will oversee the new business.”
Judging from the collapse of several major cryptocurrency companies, amid mounting regulatory tensions, the goal appears to be to provide a US-regulated and trusted Bitcoin service to customers who now do not have a platform, a US-regulated and trusted service.
It should be noted that many of the issues surrounding exchanges come from the third party risks presented by the custodian who holds bitcoins for customers. The safest way to interact with bitcoin is to keep it in your own wallet. Although trading platforms offer the ease of interaction created by custodianship, with the US financial system seeing fraught headlines lately, it is important to consider these trade-offs compared to the traditional self-custody of bitcoin.