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Nasdaq Newsroom

Technology

Mainstream and Digital Finance Are Converging, Nasdaq President Tal Cohen Tells Consensus Miami

May 15, 2026 — 01:30 pm EDT

Written by

Nasdaq Newsroom

Mainstream and digital markets are on a collision course, with Nasdaq sitting at the center, Nasdaq President Tal Cohen said at the Consensus 2026 blockchain conference in Miami.

"That convergence trend is happening. You can sense it. You can feel it," Cohen said. "We're going to have to make sure that we drive that convergence.”

Part of this convergence is the shift to always-on markets, with Cohen pointing to 23/5 trading, faster collateral mobility, and accelerated settlement times.

Cohen described a world where two separate infrastructure rails—traditional finance and blockchain finance—merge. For Nasdaq, which powers more than 130 markets globally and serves 3,800 financial institutions across six continents, it’s crucial to get this transition right.

“[Our clients] speak all kinds of languages, and they have all kinds of sophistication,” Cohen said. “From ‘I need to automate’ … to ‘I need to operate 24/7. How do you allow me to do that?’”

In his conversation with Dave LaValle, CoinDesk's president of indices and data, Cohen also discussed tokenization, artificial intelligence and the current regulatory environment.

He called the SEC’s recent role “constructive.” “They’ve been really pushing us and pushing the industry to think more innovatively,” he said.

On digital assets, Cohen identified three conditions he sees as necessary for adoption to reach exit velocity: regulatory clarity, interoperability between existing and digital infrastructure, and industry-wide agreement on standards.

The discussion also covered Nasdaq's use of AI in preparation for always-on trading. Cohen described a system in which Nasdaq has built a digital twin of its matching engine—a cloud-based replica of its production environment—and placed AI agents on top of it. Each agent was assigned a persona meant to mimic a type of market participant: a large bank, a high-frequency trading firm, and a retail investor. Those agents inject orders into the twin to simulate a range of market conditions, helping to test edge cases in a way they couldn’t in the past.

“It means the quality of our software will be better,” he said. “It means that we can innovate faster. It means the cycle time to ship software is faster.”

Cohen and LaValle connected this work to the concept of market determinism—the idea that the latency of a trade engine must be consistent and predictable. As digital asset markets mature, investors managing risk need to know exactly what speed they can expect at 99.9th percentile of confidence.

LaValle and Cohen also dug into the tokenization of equities.

“What it really does is take an asset and put it in motion,” Cohen said. “And once you put that asset into motion, you’re able to manage risk better. You are able to gain capital efficiencies.”

He addressed how tokenization would impact issuers. “We spend a lot of time with issuers, explaining to them how we can solve some pain points, how it presents some opportunities in terms of shareholder engagement, and what the path to tokenization looks like,” Cohen said.

Tokenization can help with proxy voting and other routine corporate processes. “It becomes programmable,” he said. “And that saves you money, time.”

“And then on the back of that, there's deeper shareholder engagement,” Cohen said. “All these companies want deeper shareholder engagement. ‘Who are my customers?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why do they like my products?’ ‘Why do they like my brands?’ ‘How does tokenization help me with that?’ Those are the kinds of conversations we’re having.”

Key to helping clients, he added, is solving the interoperability challenge. And the way to do that is by reducing complexity.

“Nobody wants to run two separate infrastructures,” he said. Instead, Nasdaq tells clients, “Whether you're in the existing world or in the digital world, I'm bringing it all together for you, so you get the benefits of both."

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