Written by: Vicky Ge Huang and Krystal Hur, The Wall Street Journal
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
The New York Stock Exchange is investing heavily in digital assets and plans to build a 24/7 trading platform for blockchain-based securities.
Centralized, with high barriers to entry and closed on weekends, the New York Stock Exchange was, in its very structure, a symbol of everything that Bitcoin was meant to disrupt at its inception. Yet, this 233-year-old Wall Street giant has quietly transformed itself into an unexpected leader in the cryptocurrency world.
From investing billions of dollars in the digital asset space to planning to launch a 24/7 trading platform for blockchain securities, this legendary exchange is undergoing its most ambitious and potentially riskiest transformation ever: reshaping its centuries-old system using the distributed ledger technology behind Bitcoin.
"We have always been at the forefront of the market's evolution from analog to electronic. I believe we are now entering a new wave of moving from electronic to digital," said Michael Blaugrund, Vice President of Strategy at Intercontinental Exchange (the parent company of the NYSE).
He said he foresaw a "highly probable future": blockchain would become an important vehicle for the NYSE's core business, including trading, clearing, settlement, financing, and data distribution.
The New York Stock Exchange building in Manhattan's financial district
It was under the leadership of Jeffrey Sprecher, founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), that this belief was translated into action. According to sources, the NYSE invested approximately $200 million in cryptocurrency exchange OKX in March of this year. This deal valued OKX at $25 billion, and just a year prior, the China-based exchange had paid over $500 million to settle a federal investigation.
This investment is just one part of a broader strategy on Wall Street. From prediction markets to cryptocurrencies, previously considered high-risk and off-limits, institutions are once again paying attention. The Trump administration's favorable regulatory stance on non-traditional financial assets, coupled with individual investor demand for such high-risk transactions, has fueled this trend.
The NYSE's bets on cryptocurrencies come at a time of hardship for crypto bulls. Bitcoin just experienced its worst start to the year since the first quarter of 2018. Recently, Bitcoin's price has hovered around $75,000, well below the high of $126,273 reached last October. At that time, the market had hoped that Trump's involvement with the crypto space and favorable industry regulations would usher in a golden age for digital assets.
Such a sharp drop might have been fatal in the past, but it has barely dampened Wall Street's interest in cryptocurrencies. Last month, Nasdaq, a rival of the NYSE, announced plans to launch tokenized stocks on its platform in partnership with crypto exchange Kraken and other companies. Major banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are also considering issuing their own stablecoins.
Last December, Sprecher met with OKX founder Xu Mingxing at a French restaurant in London. OKX Global Managing Partner Haider Rafique, who was also in attendance, said the two founders hit it off immediately due to their shared product engineering background and similar low-key personalities.
Later this year, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) will use OKX's cryptocurrency spot price data and launch related futures contracts regulated in the United States. Subject to regulatory approval, OKX will open trading access to ICE's US futures and the NYSE's tokenized stocks to its more than 120 million global users. This is a key step in the NYSE's plan to issue blockchain-based digital securities.
The NYSE recently announced a partnership with Securitize to develop a tokenized securities platform that supports 24/7 trading and instant settlement. Investors can also trade using stablecoins.
Market data and quotes are reflected in the glass of the NYSE building.
The NYSE's crypto footprint extends to prediction markets. This rapidly growing sector allows users to bet on a wide range of topics, including politics and sports. Last October, ICE agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket, valuing the blockchain-based prediction market exchange at $9 billion.
This seemingly unlikely deal stemmed from a shared experience between the two parties during an FBI raid. On November 13, 2024, FBI agents raided the Manhattan residence of Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan in the early morning, waking him and confiscating his cell phone in order to investigate whether the platform was illegally allowing U.S. users to trade on its website.
After the Justice Department dropped its investigation, Sprecher contacted Coplan. In an interview with CNBC, Sprecher stated that Coplan was "wrongly accused of misconduct and subjected to a raid by the FBI," and that he himself had experienced something similar several years prior.
“I’m old and bald, he’s young and has messy hair; I have a closet full of ties, and I doubt he has a single one,” Sprecher said on the NYSE trading floor. “The company we’re in now was founded in 1792, and by 2025 he will own the hottest company in the financial services sector.”
Like cryptocurrency companies, prediction markets have been fraught with controversy since their rise. The Trump administration and states are engaged in heated debate over whether event-based contracts constitute online gambling and should be regulated in the same way.
The NYSE has proactively avoided this controversy, with Sprecher explicitly stating that the NYSE's interest is focused on non-sports betting, such as weather and corporate events.
"If Polymarket can handle the sports-related business, that's great. It's not our priority in terms of what we can do for them and what they can do for us," Sprecher said in an earnings call last October.
Betting on prediction markets is not the first time the NYSE has made early moves into emerging and controversial industries. In January 2015, the NYSE made a minority stake in Coinbase, when Bitcoin was still a fringe asset priced at around $300; when it sold that stake in 2021, it made a profit of $900 million.
Not all crypto investments on the NYSE have yielded returns. The most striking example is Bakkt. Launched by ICE in 2018 with the initial goal of offering physically settled Bitcoin futures, the platform's business model has since shifted dramatically, moving from a retail points app to a technology infrastructure focus. By 2023, ICE had written down its stake in Bakkt by over $1 billion. In 2024, the stock also received a delisting warning from the NYSE.
Today, Bakkt is trying to transform into an AI-driven infrastructure platform, but it is still hampered by the loss of a key customer, Webull, which contributed 74% of its crypto revenue in 2024.
Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer, when discussing Bakkt's latest transformation, said, "This is still a story that needs to be told with facts, and this situation is likely to continue until we see a large number of partnerships finalized and announced."
