Fintech on File #4 | NYSE/Nasdaq tokenized infra; CLARITY CRCL/COIN impact
March 30, 2026
The two largest U.S. equity exchanges are making their tokenization bets — and they’re taking fundamentally different approaches. Two interesting interviews from Plaid co-founders — CEO Zach Perret and founder and CEO of Column, Will Hockey. Plus, what CLARITY means for Circle and Coinbase.
Fintech In The News
NYSE Partners With Securitize to Develop 24/7 Tokenized Securities Platform | WSJ
The New York Stock Exchange signed a memorandum of understanding with Securitize, the BlackRock-backed tokenization firm, to co-develop what NYSE is calling its “Digital Trading Platform” — a blockchain-based venue designed for 24/7 trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs.
Under the deal, Securitize becomes NYSE’s first “digital transfer agent,” meaning it will be responsible for minting blockchain-based shares — converting traditional stocks and ETFs into tokens that carry full shareholder rights, including voting power and dividend access. As Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo put it, most tokenized equity products today are functionally derivatives or price trackers that don’t confer actual ownership. NYSE is building native tokenization within a regulated securities framework.
The platform’s features include round-the-clock trading, instant settlement, fractional share purchases, dollar-denominated orders, and stablecoin-based funding. The technical backbone pairs NYSE’s existing Pillar matching engine with blockchain post-trade infrastructure designed to support multiple chains. ICE is simultaneously working with BNY and Citi to enable tokenized deposits across its clearinghouses, so clearing members can manage margin and funding requirements outside traditional banking hours.
This announcement came just days after the SEC approved Nasdaq’s competing tokenized securities framework, and weeks after ICE’s minority investment in crypto exchange OKX at a $25 billion valuation.
Nasdaq Seeks to Build Crypto Into Wall Street’s Market Plumbing | Bloomberg
While NYSE is building a separate blockchain venue from scratch, Nasdaq is taking the opposite approach: embedding crypto infrastructure directly into the existing pipes that Wall Street already uses to manage risk, collateral, and surveillance across traditional asset classes.
Nasdaq has partnered with digital asset technology firm Talos to connect crypto trading and risk-management tools with Nasdaq’s Calypso platform — the same system banks and brokers use to manage collateral and surveillance across stocks and bonds. Through the deal, Talos’ institutional client base (hedge funds, retail brokers, etc.) will gain access to Nasdaq’s traditional risk-management stack for their crypto operations, while Nasdaq gets a pathway to serve the crypto market using infrastructure it already sells to the financial system’s largest participants.
This comes on top of two other major Nasdaq moves this month. First, the SEC approved Nasdaq’s framework to trade certain tokenized stocks and ETFs on blockchain rails alongside traditional shares — a regulatory milestone. Second, Nasdaq tapped crypto exchange Kraken to distribute stock tokens globally, giving tokenized Nasdaq-listed securities a pathway to Kraken’s international user base. Nasdaq also partnered with Talos separately to create a tokenized collateral management solution, addressing one of the key structural barriers that has prevented institutional adoption of tokenized assets.
The philosophical difference between NYSE and Nasdaq is worth noting. Nasdaq is layering tokenization onto existing clearing infrastructure — tokenized shares still trade through brokers, still settle via DTCC, with blockchain used mainly as an alternative record of ownership. This uses blockchain’s efficiency gains while keeping existing intermediaries in place. NYSE is building a parallel blockchain-native venue that could eventually bypass traditional settlement entirely.
This Week’s Media
Both recommended interviews come via Plaid’s co-founders: CEO Zach Perret and former Plaid executive, now founder and CEO of Column, William Hockey. First, Perret on TBPN (link) discussing credit cards and their competitive position vis-a-vis stablecoins for agentic payments:
“For as far as I can see, which in this environment is maybe a year or something like that, I think agents using credit cards is going to be by far the primary thing that happens. The reason for that is merchants accept credit cards. Merchants don’t accept stablecoins, for the most part, for most of the things that a consumer wants to do. Now, over time, certain types of merchants might start to accept stablecoins. The question is: will the companies that care about making credit cards really easy be able to make them sufficiently easy in the amount of time before merchants actually start thinking about accepting stablecoins? And my hunch is, you’ve seen, I think Ramp actually launched an agentic credit card... I know there’s a bunch of other agentic credit cards that are out there, and I can’t imagine that there will not be 5,000 YC companies launching agentic-focused credit cards soon. So I think we will see more and more options pop up. That’s not to say I’m not a believer in stablecoins. I think it’d be super cool, but I just don’t think it’s realistic in a short time frame.”
Second, Hockey’s interview with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best (link). The whole interview was great and a recommended listen, but I thought this comment on the US banking and Federal Reserve technology infrastructure, and why money movement constraints are a feature not a bug:
“The other thing I tell people is there’s this narrative like, “Oh, financial services is fundamentally broken.” Our institutions are actually pretty damn good. There’s this narrative sometimes people talk about, it’s like, “Oh, US financial services. It’s built on COBOL and stuff like this.” It’s just not, it’s like a fun talking point.
I rack my own hardware at the federal reserve and all these places. There’s no COBOL in a lot of these places. It’s actually pretty good. I’ll go on the record talking about this. The Fed is a pretty good tech team. Their systems are actually pretty good. You think about the US right now, through the Fed, has a capability to move money and to clear money through all these institutions, 24/7. Faster than stablecoins, faster than crypto. Right now, as we speak. We’ve had that for decades. Systems are very good, extremely reliant. They’re fantastic. I think it’s very challenging for Silicon Valley to build something better.
The problem isn’t in the fundamental infrastructure, it’s in our implementation of it. The reason why community banks can’t send money 24/7 isn’t because the technology doesn’t exist at the Fed. It’s because there are constraints in those business models that make it very challenging and something to do.
Give you an example. If you can send money out of your community bank 24/7 – well, that bank could run on a weekend. I don’t know if you guys have ever like been to a rural community, the community bank with 50 people – you can’t get people to work on the weekends.
If you’re JP Morgan, if you’re Stripe, yeah, you can manage 24/7 liquidity. But if you’re a small community bank, you can’t have that. It’s why I think people conflate “We don’t have something, we don’t have access to something,” with “We don’t have the fundamental ability to do that.” But actually the reason is implementation, not the underlying infrastructure.”
What I Wrote This Week
What CLARITY Means for CRCL/COIN; Tether’s Audit | March 24, 2026
The CLARITY Act’s proposed yield ban would prohibit stablecoins from offering interest “directly or indirectly,” potentially putting COIN’s USDC rewards program in the crosshairs. Banning rewards would be a near-term boost to COIN’s EBITDA — eliminating the $127M in Q4 USDC Rewards would have boosted COIN’s adjusted EBITDA by 23%.
For CRCL, the near-term economics don’t change (it still keeps ~37% of Reserve Income), but mid-term growth could stall if removing yield makes USDC less compelling in developed markets where holding dollars alone isn’t a sufficient value proposition. If the proposed bill stays as is, prohibiting yield sharing removes the most plausible mechanism for getting stablecoins into consumer wallets at scale, likely relegating them to back-end settlement infrastructure rather than a disruptive front-end payment method.
Meanwhile, Tether announced a Big Four audit (FT later reported the auditor is KPMG) — worth watching given CRCL has arguably been gaining international share in part because of Tether’s compliance gaps.