Drive the entire capital market to explore blockchain and form an ecosystem

Chain.com announced at the end of last year that it would issue the company's shares on Nasdaq's blockchain platform Linq, becoming the first case. Fredrik Voss, head of blockchain strategy at Nasdaq, said that more companies will join in the future.

Linq is a new equity trading platform based on blockchain technology developed by Nasdaq in its private market. Chain.com is a blockchain startup that became a partner of Nasdaq's Linq platform in June 2015. After the Linq platform was developed, Chain.com naturally became the only choice to experience the platform. Voss said that the progress was very smooth.

As we all know, Nasdaq is one of the busiest exchanges in the world, but it still noticed the niche technology of blockchain and foresaw that the innovation and advantages of this technology would bring challenges to the traditional financial market. So Nasdaq had the idea of ​​experimenting with this technology. Nasdaq believes that the value of technology lies in sharing, and it is impossible to conduct experiments alone, and it needs to cooperate with like-minded corporate communities.

Voss said:

“It doesn’t make much sense if we are busy doing our own little accounts, or our own solutions, just for our own benefit. The real value of this technology lies in forming an ecosystem… As a member of the financial market, we feel a responsibility to drive players in the capital market to explore this new technology together. However, our innovation plan is still in its early stages, and our goals may change in various ways in the future.”

Fredrik Voss

So by the end of this year, can we see the market adopting distributed ledger technology on a large scale? Probably not, Voss believes that although the development roadmap of blockchain has begun to take shape, there is still a lot of testing, learning and collecting feedback to be done before we can see any form of large-scale adoption.
Voss said:

“So our goal right now is to learn as much as possible about how this technology might impact operational processes and procedures, and how it fits into the regulatory environment. To achieve this, we are looking for gentle implementations that are not too complex and do not require replacing existing technology.

Nasdaq is already moving forward with its blockchain equity trading pilot, which is conducting private equity transactions in a relatively closed environment with little involvement of existing technology infrastructure such as files, Excel spreadsheets, faxes and FedEx.

Voss also noted that private markets face less complex regulation in the U.S. than public markets.

We want to get the technology out of the lab and see how it is used in a real environment, with real investors and companies involved.

In 2015, we have heard a lot of discussion about blockchain use cases and have seen some startups implementing blockchain technology, such as Symbiont's announcement in August 2015 that it had issued its own shares through distributed ledger technology. Recently, according to multiple sources close to Symbiont, the smart securities trading platform has completed a round of financing of $7 million, and the company's current valuation has reached $70 million. Voss said that this year (2016), we will see more deployment of related services, which provides practical experience for the industry to develop better.

Voss said:

“By the end of 2016, we hope to be able to summarize the development experience and come to a set of conclusions, including whether the technology has won a positive response from the public, whether there is a desire to implement the technology, and whether companies are willing to shift investment from traditional technologies to this new technology.”

Larger-scale products may begin to appear in the market in 2017. In view of Nasdaq's successful execution of equity transactions on the blockchain not long ago, Voss reiterated the potential of distributed ledger technology: "This technology holds great promise for truly revolutionizing the operation of capital markets, but we also recognize that it needs to adapt to the existing technology ecosystem, such as procedures, operations and regulatory provisions."

Original article: http://www.risk.net/risk/news/2441444/nasdaq-pioneering-trade-means-2016-will-be-year-of-blockchain
By David Dawkins
Translator: printemps
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/nasdaq-pioneer-blockchain)