You Won’t Believe How Nasdaq is Wrangling Crypto Like a Riverboat Gambler

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Well now, Nasdaq’s gone and cooked up a fancy new scheme to rope crypto into the U.S. markets — all dressed up to keep folks’ hard-earned money from shootin’ off into the wild blue yonder. 🤠

Nasdaq’s Grand Huckster Plan to Marry Digital Assets and Wall Street

So here’s the scoop: Nasdaq Inc., those high-falutin’ market fellas, sent a letter dated April 25 to the SEC’s own gatekeeper, Vanessa Countryman. Their top legal brain, John A. Zecca, laid out a grand vision to tidy up this digital asset hullabaloo without letting the investors get fleeced.

Zecca’s pitch? Toss out some sensible labels and fix up the trading machines like you’d mend a creaky ol’ riverboat. He reckons clear categories are the solid ground for any future crypto rules, saying:

“A successful taxonomy would include clear categories and a process to manage change going forward as the industry evolves.”

The blueprint’s got four neat boxes: Financial Securities, Digital Asset Investment Contracts, Digital Asset Commodities, and Other Digital Assets. Sort of like sorting your livestock into cows, hogs, chickens, and the critters you ain’t quite sure about yet.

Now, Nasdaq argues those old-timey rules should still ride shotgun for Financial Securities, whether they come as paper shares or shiny tokens. After all, a mule’s a mule no matter if it’s painted gold:

“Whether it takes the form of a paper share, a digital share, or a token, an instrument’s underlying nature remains the same and it should be traded and regulated in the same ways.”

Next up, they want to whip up a special trading corral called “ATS-Digital” or “ATS-D” to handle the more unruly digital critters like commodities and unclassified assets, giving them a lighter leash but still plenty of oversight. Zecca sez:

“Create a new category of ATS called ‘ATS-Digital’ or ‘ATS-D’ that may trade Digital Asset Investment Contracts, Digital Assets Commodities, Other Digital Assets, and Temporarily Unclassified Digital Assets in its own appropriately regulated ecosystem.”

And just to keep the peace with regulators still figurin’ out the lay of the land, Nasdaq’s begging for a voluntary safe harbor—a kind of “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes” zone where oddball digital assets can trade openly but under watchful eyes and honest warnings. Zecca throws in this pearl:

“Innovation must serve the interests of investors, and not the other way around.”

Finally, Nasdaq’s calling on the SEC, the CFTC, and even Congress to saddle up together and lead this digital asset rodeo, confident that the U.S. can lasso the chaos and keep markets steady as a preacher on Sunday:

“The Commission can establish an attractive path for integrating digital asset technology into the capital markets.”

And there you have it—crypto’s coming to the county fair of American finance, just don’t ask me who’s running the cotton candy stand. 🎪💸

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2025-04-29 05:00