Tokenization Could Unlock $10B+ in Trapped Capital, Nasdaq CEO Says

For capital markets professionals, the most important number in Friedman's TOKEN2049 remarks is not a quarter's earnings but the "tens of billions of dollars" trapped in collateral today. If tokenization makes Treasurys, equities, and money market funds as fluid as cash, the resulting collateral velocity could compress settlement risk, lower funding costs, and reshape margin operations across broker-dealers, clearing banks, and asset managers — while creating a new revenue stream for market infrastructure providers like Nasdaq.

Adena Friedman, CEO of Nasdaq, told CNBC at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore on October 8, 2026, that tokenization could unlock tens of billions of dollars in capital currently trapped in assets posted as collateral across the global financial system. Her remarks mark one of the clearest statements from a major exchange operator about the near-term economic rationale for blockchain-based tokenization. The assets Friedman identified — Treasurys, equities, and money market funds — sit at the core of collateral management, and she argued that tokenizing these instruments, together with the flow of money itself, would make collateral "very fluid." This fluidity matters because collateral today is often locked in settlement cycles, segregated accounts, and manual workflows that limit reuse and slow capital velocity.

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For an exchange group like Nasdaq, the opportunity includes new revenue from tokenization infrastructure, data, listing digital assets, and risk-management software.

The broader industry context is the convergence of regulatory progress and market demand. Friedman pointed to the passage of the U.S. Genius Act, which created a regulatory framework for stablecoins, as a catalyst for institutional interest over the past year. Stablecoins themselves are a tokenized form of money, and a workable U.S. regime gives banks and asset managers a clearer path to integrate on-chain cash equivalents. According to Friedman, this institutional shift is converging with retail demand that has been "about 10 years ahead," particularly around the ability to trade around the clock. That asymmetry has pressured incumbents to modernize infrastructure, and tokenization offers a technical route to 24/7 trading without relying purely on legacy batch systems. Friedman acknowledged that moving to fully continuous markets would be a major undertaking: financial institutions have historically used closed periods to update systems and manage risk, whereas tokenized, always-on markets would require "everything to be real time all the time."

The operational implications for banks and market infrastructure are significant. Risk and collateral management functions that are currently scheduled around trading hours would need to run continuously. This includes margin calculations, collateral substitution, treasury reinvestment, and default management. Artificial intelligence is central to Nasdaq's answer. The company has already launched a series of digital agents within its risk management platform; initially these agents provide recommendations, but Friedman said banks could use them to take more direct action over time. That progression — from assistive to autonomous — mirrors the broader automation arc in capital markets and could reduce the operational cost of a 24/7 trading environment. It also positions Nasdaq as a technology vendor, not just an exchange, with a product line that addresses a pain point regulators and bank risk officers will scrutinize closely.