Overstock: “Nasdaq Could Help Push Blockchain Tech Into Financial Sector Mainstream”

Nasdaq has decease 1 of the showtime multinational fiscal services companies to delve into non-currency usage of blockchain technology. On Monday, May 11, the fellowship announced that it would laid about to leverage the colored money protocol Open Assets to “expand as well as elevate the equity administration capabilities offered yesteryear its Nasdaq Private Market platform.”

According to Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld, the distributed ledger business office of the blockchain volition “modernize, streamline as well as secure typically cumbersome administrative functions, as well as volition simplify the overwhelming challenges someone companies aspect upwardly amongst manual ledger record-keeping.”

Nasdaq joins the blockchain-integrated securities substitution marketplace land simply a few weeks afterward Overstock’s Medici Project filed S-3 forms amongst the Securities as well as Exchange Commission, outlining its intention to termination novel stocks or securities, including the potential to termination digital securities.

In an interview amongst Bitcoin Magazine, Overstock.com’s manager of communications, Judd Bagley, welcomed Nasdaq’s announcement, noting several ways inwards which it could get got a positive impact on the fiscal sector.

The showtime is inwards overcoming the hurdle of marketplace acceptance. “The actual people who volition hold out clicking the mouse authorizing existent trades need to experience comfortable amongst this novel paradigm, which upends a 75-year-old organisation approximately don’t currently consider every bit broken,” said Bagley. Having Nasdaq on board could assist to force blockchain applied scientific discipline into the fiscal sector mainstream.

Regulatory credence is approximately other matter. According to Bagley, it’s upwardly to companies similar Overstock as well as Nasdaq “to print upon regulators that a stock substitution based on decentralized ledgers is non exclusively every bit practiced every bit what’s currently inwards place, but better.”

Bagley said that amongst Overstock inwards the procedure of getting SEC blessing to termination digital shares, it has developed approximately “very interesting fiscal innovations” that volition hold out rolled out on the Medici platform inwards the close future.

“Understandably, we’re expecting approximately probing questions. After all, regulators are, yesteryear nature, conservative. But this is 1 of the reasons nosotros are as well as therefore pleased to consider NASDAQ getting inwards on blockchain trading. We tin job all the back upwardly nosotros tin respect when it comes to getting this novel approach approved. Having NASDAQ working to encounter the same regulatory goals every bit nosotros are tin exclusively assist us.”

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has been outspoken inwards the yesteryear close Wall Street’s culpability when it comes to shielding bad actors inwards the fiscal sector. Bagley does non await that Nasdaq’s latest motion volition create much to send upon this larger problem.

“One of the reasons immature companies avoid Earth equity markets is job organisation over the predations of illegal brusque sellers,” he explained. “Blockchain trading of pre-IPO shares volition brand it to hold bad actors from preying on these companies. So on that level, Nasdaq is joining us inwards doing a practiced thing.”

Trading of pre-IPO shares, however, represents exclusively a small-scale fraction of the overall fiscal trading picture, Bagley added. “Decentralized ledgers similar the blockchain are too extremely well-suited for the trading of shares of world companies, as well as and therefore we’re incorporating that functionality into Medici every bit well.”

 

 

 

Photo: Time Square/New York / CC BY 2.0