Crypto is fighting off its back foot this week as Ethereum and Bitcoin fall to levels not seen since the end of the summer doldrums.
But one blockchain — Avalanche — was bucking the downtrend to start the week, thanks to winning the right to say it'll be the NYSE's home for settlement when its tokenized stock trading platform goes live.
NYSE has long mentioned it's been exploring ways to enable 24/7 settlement — and had been looking to leverage a blockchain to enable that. Ava Labs President and COO Charley Cooper joined Coinage to explain how Avalanche scooped the win from the likes of Ethereum, Solana, and other private blockchain competitors.
"What the New York Stock Exchange recognized was that for 24/7 markets to operate effectively in equities, they also had to nail the post-trade piece because that's where things break," Cooper said. "By doing this on Avalanche, the minute you have a trade, you have instantaneous atomic settlement and clearing downstream the post-trade stuff, which is again, kind of boring for a lot of people — but it's critically important."
Wall Street Journal's Vicky Ge Huang first reported the partnership. NYSE's parent company Intercontinental Exchange had previously announced it was working on a tokenized platform to allow for 24/7 trading back in January. The deal with Avalanche will now allow for clearing and settlement of tokenized securities, pending regulatory approval, before 2026 ends.
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There's a big debate going on in crypto right now about public vs. private blockchains — and whether it's a good or bad thing that so much info about onchain transactions are effectively broadcast to everyone on the internet.
Even Venmo lets you make transactions private so that no one can see who you're paying or what you're paying for. But rest assured, if prosecutors wanted to ask PayPal for "private" Venmo transactions they'd be able to get them. And when you sign up for Venmo, PayPal is definitely making sure you're not on a sanctions list.
But how does all of that square with public blockchains like Ethereum or Solana that are founded on being permissionless? And do private blockchains essentially lose any benefits if they aren't compatible with other systems?
That has been the driving force behind both Ethereum Layer-2s (that sit on top of Ethereum) and Avalanche's shift in strategy last year — which had its team selling institutions on customizable "L1s" of their own that can leverage Avalanche's Ethereum-compatible blockchain to preserve more controls.
As Cooper explained, that control and balance was paramount to why NYSE picked Avalanche.
"What we proposed to them and that they agreed to do with us was to launch their own L1 that plugs into the Avalanche, the main ecosystem that would allow them to build their solution in-line with their business, technology, and ultimately regulatory requirements, which obviously is an important thing for a regulated exchange like the New York Stock Exchange," he said. "So they really pulled the levers and tested the various different parts of our technology solution to make sure that we could deliver to them what the market has come to expect from them."
It's a fascinating win for Avalanche — and comes as NYSE's parent company ICE continues to build on efforts to tokenize shares from issuers that haven't opted out on OKX's Ethereum Layer-2.
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