Key Points
Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman sees tokenized money as the first step toward always-on markets.
Tokenizing both cash and collateral could free up tens of billions of dollars in trapped bank capital.
Wall Street is likely to adopt crypto tools selectively, not all at once.
Crypto traders have been buying and selling on Sunday mornings for more than a decade. Wall Street still keeps banker's hours, with the main trading session ending at 4 p.m. and weekends off.
Nasdaq (NASDAQ: NDAQ) CEO Adena Friedman wants to change that. Speaking at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore this month, she was refreshingly candid about who got there first.
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"The retail ecosystem, as we know, has been kind of 10 years ahead," she told CNBC's Joanna Ossinger.
Ten years is a long head start. Nasdaq's catch-up plan begins on Dec. 6, when it starts trading U.S. stocks 23 hours a day, five days a week. The full 24/7 version is a much bigger project, and Friedman made it clear that the exchange itself is the easy part. The hard part is everything that comes after it.
A harbor that never closes
Picture a busy harbor that has always shut down overnight. The crews go home, the cranes get serviced, and the paperwork catches up before sunrise. Now imagine ships arriving around the clock. Every crane, tugboat, and customs desk suddenly needs a night shift.
That's roughly what Friedman described. Banks and brokers have relied on closed hours to patch systems, run batch processing, and tidy up risk calculations. In an always-on market, that downtime disappears.
"Everything has to be real-time, all the time," she said, nearly quoting a couple of A24 movie titles.
That includes money. If a trade happens in the middle of Saturday night, the cash has to move at that point, too. Traditional bank wires don't keep those always-on hours.
Image source: Getty Images.
Meet the most boring hero in crypto
Tokenization turns real-world assets, from dollars to Treasury bonds, into digital tokens on a blockchain ledger. Those tokens can change hands in seconds, at any hour. Friedman sees a two-step path to making this work at scale: tokenize the money first, then everything else.
In practice, tokenized money means stablecoins. A dollar stablecoin is about as thrilling as a feather pillow. It's supposed to be worth a dollar today, tomorrow, and at 3 a.m. on Saturday. That dullness is the whole job description.
Friedman put it more elegantly: "If we can tokenize money, then we can tokenize the flow of capital."
Step two is tokenizing the collateral banks pledge to back their trades. With stablecoins on one side and tokenized assets on the other, that collateral can move as fast as the trades themselves. Beyond basic cash, think Treasuries, stocks, and money market funds. Friedman said that could free up "tens and tens of billions of dollars of capital" now stuck in collateral pools. That's bank capital getting a second job rather than a crypto windfall, but it's still a lot of money.
She also gave credit to the GENIUS Act for getting the ball rolling. The 2025 stablecoin law set the "rules of the road," as she put it, and big institutions started paying attention.
The law isn't fully in force yet. It takes effect on Jan. 18, 2027, or 120 days after final rules are issued, whichever comes first, and no final rule arrived early enough to beat the January date.
Wall Street is trying on crypto's glove
Here's the part crypto investors might find less exciting. Friedman doesn't expect traditional finance to adopt the entire crypto playbook. Mainstream markets already have tools like margin and net settlement. Therefore, tokenization "might look a little different than how the crypto ecosystem works today," Friedman said.
In other words, Wall Street is shopping crypto's store for accessories, not a new outfit. Stablecoin settlement and round-the-clock trading might be the glove that fits; the rest can stay on the rack for now.
The legislative side tells a similar story. Friedman mentioned what might happen "if the Clarity Act ever gets approved." That word "ever" is doing some heavy lifting. The broader crypto market-structure bill failed a Senate procedural vote in September amid fights over ethics rules and over whether stablecoin holders should earn interest-like rewards. The GENIUS Act is the law of the land and is in the process of implementation; the Clarity Act is still more of a wish list.
So who wins?
Stablecoins won't make anyone rich directly. Popular stablecoin USDC (CRYPTO: USDC) is worth a dollar today, and if all goes well, it'll be worth a dollar next year, too.
The more interesting question is who owns the pipes. Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) collects interest on the reserves behind USDC, so more circulation means more income. Visa (NYSE: V) already settles some card payments in stablecoins. And Friedman's Nasdaq does double duty, operating its own markets and licensing its trade infrastructure technology to 135 other market operators and regulators, plus hundreds of brokers and banks.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't count on Wall Street's tokenization push to boost crypto across the board. If Friedman is right, banks will adopt stablecoins and tokenized collateral on their own terms, and the companies running those pipes will collect the fees.
Anders Bylund has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Visa. The Motley Fool recommends Nasdaq. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.