New York City-based stock exchange Nasdaq will partner with blockchain technology company R3 with the purpose of helping financial institutions build their own digital asset marketplaces, according to a press release published by R3 on April 29.

The long-term, non-exclusive partnership will see Nasdaq use R3’s Corda Enterprise platform to “ to support new institutional grade assets utilizing Corda Enterprise to manage the complete asset lifecycle for new and existing market infrastructure operators on a 24x7x365 basis.”

The two parties believe that the collaboration will help digital assets marketplaces strengthen transparency in a manner that aligns with capital markets.  R3’s Chief Revenue Officer Cathy Minter said,

Financial institutions are becoming increasingly aware of the huge potential for servicing the needs of digital assets. We can help them accommodate these assets with solutions that are designed for more secure, reliable and regulated environments. Together with Nasdaq we will provide a world-class platform on which digital asset markets can be built, helping to rapidly accelerate the growth of these markets and others around the globe.

Nasdaq Keen on Institutionalizing Digital Assets

Meanwhile, Nasdaq has elaborated on its own vision for digital assets. In a post published on April 29, under the headline of “The Journey Towards Digital Assets Institutionalization”, sees Nasdaq’s Head of Digital Assets speak of the stock exchange’s understanding of the key elements that might drive adoption.

When asked about what role Nasdaq is currently playing in the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and digital assets markets, Toll talks of the proof-of-concepts and projects that it has undertaken, 

Over the last few years, our Market Technology business has been bringing our mission-critical solutions across the trade lifecycle into the digital assets space to conduct low-latency, highly scalable and available trading, and to monitor markets for potential instances of abuse to strengthen integrity.

As for the partnership with R3, Toll has high hopes and says that financial institutions will benefit from more robust systems,

Overall, our goal is to provide financial institutions with an easily accessible, complete solution to issue tokens and build trusted, digital asset marketplaces designed for high security for trading and settling them within an ecosystem that supports growing volumes, as well as business and product development.