- According to a regulatory filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the NYSE, the world’s deepest and most liquid financial market, said that it plans to be a financial exchange for cryptocurrencies and NFTs that would compete with the likes of OpenSea and Rarible.
- Nevertheless, the NYSE had minted its first NFTs last year, in a move that digitally memorialized some of the exchange’s biggest IPOs, including Spotify, Snowflake and Roblox.
As recently as 2018, there was no shortage of cryptocurrency exchanges.
At the height of the initial coin offering or ICO craze, there were at times more cryptocurrency exchanges than there were coins to list on them.
Because there are no barriers to entry, decentralized exchanges which rely on smart contracts to facilitate transactions have technically no means to block anyone from listing a cryptocurrency token.
But as more institutional investors look at cryptocurrencies and the non-fungible token space continues to grow, the New York Stock Exchange is stepping in to bring some adult supervision to the space.
According to a regulatory filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the NYSE, the world’s deepest and most liquid financial market, said that it plans to be a financial exchange for cryptocurrencies and NFTs that would compete with the likes of OpenSea and Rarible.
The filing dated February 10, indicates plans for the NYSE to issue its own token and a marketplace to trade NFTs.
But advocates who have long been waiting for more institutional participation in the cryptocurrency sector may want to manage their expectations of the NYSE’s impending move, with the exchange saying in a statement that it had no immediate plans to launch its own token or NFT trading.
Instead, the NYSE may simply be staking its own turf, in the event that cryptocurrencies and NFTs go mainstream and pre-emptively protecting its intellectual property rights.
Nevertheless, the NYSE had minted its first NFTs last year, in a move that digitally memorialized some of the exchange’s biggest IPOs, including Spotify (+3.61%), Snowflake (+3.05%) and Roblox (+7.29%).
