The New Era of the Stock Market with Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman | All-In Summit 2025

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Over the last year to date, up 14 percent. Over the last year, Nasdaq shares up 40 percent.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Over the five-year period, more than doubled up over 100 percent.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
You've been on a real tear.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:10)
She is often on the list of not just the most influential women in finance, but just the most influential.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:16)
Adena transformed Nasdaq into a global tech powerhouse.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
Adena is a deal maker at her core. Nasdaq is in the business of deals.

**Adena Friedman** (0:24)
We are here to advance economic progress for all.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
Welcome.

**Adena Friedman** (0:42)
Hey, Jason, how are you?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
Thanks for coming.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:43)
How are you?

**Adena Friedman** (0:43)
Hi, Chamath. Great to see you. Hey, David.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:45)
Adena.

**Adena Friedman** (0:46)
Great. It's great to be here.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:47)
Welcome. Thanks for coming out.

**Adena Friedman** (0:49)
What a day you've been having.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:51)
Yeah. So you caught some of the action earlier today, right?

**Adena Friedman** (0:53)
I did. I did. I've been watching from behind the scenes. It's been amazing to watch.

**David Sacks** (0:57)
You've been hanging backstage. Did you have a favorite moment or speaker?

**Adena Friedman** (1:02)
Oh, I never liked to pick favorites. At Nasdaq, we don't pick favorites. We have great companies, but obviously, Renee is a wonderful Nasdaq listed company and I've gotten to know her very well with Arm. I would say I always have great conversations.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:15)
Adena, sorry. Nasdaq is more than a market. I wanted to start with this real important question because when we were talking, I didn't realize that Nasdaq was more than just the Nasdaq market that we all know. Maybe just for the audience, you could just share a little bit more about the broader business.

**Adena Friedman** (1:29)
Sure. Thank you. First of all, we are really proud of our foundation as a market. But as we started to grow and expand the business, first of all, when I became CEO, we had about $2.5 billion in revenue. Today, or as of the end of last year, we had a little over $2.5 billion of EBITDA. So we've grown and expanded the business quite dramatically. How we've done that is taking our core as a market and saying, what more can we do for our clients? We are an architect of modern markets. We provide our technology to our 17 markets, and we sell it to 135 other markets around the world. So market infrastructure is our business and we do that globally. Then the second is really being powering that innovation economy, like companies like René Arm and other great companies. So we've expanded that. So our index business now has about $700 billion of assets under management that are tied to those great innovators, in addition to creating better abilities for companies to navigate the public markets and investors to find investments.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:27)
And you had a big announcement today.

**Adena Friedman** (2:28)
And then the third is also building trust across the financial system. And that is anti-financial crime technology, market surveillance technology, other technologies that the banking industry and the broker-dealer industry really need to manage their lives in the markets. And you're right, we had a big announcement today.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:47)
Which almost Vlad foreshadowed before you actually. Yeah.

**Adena Friedman** (2:50)
And actually it goes right back to that first pillar, being the architect of modern markets.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:54)
Do you want to tell people what?

**Adena Friedman** (2:55)
You think we should?

**Jason Calacanis** (2:56)
Yeah, yeah.

**Adena Friedman** (2:56)
Okay. So this morning we announced that we're going to be bringing tokenization into our markets. So making sure that equities are tokenized and traded on market, in the markets, not in a side sleeve, but actually in the core markets.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:12)
So the eventual goal, or is it today? 24 by 7, 365, equities just let it rip constantly.

**Adena Friedman** (3:19)
I mean, I think we are all moving in that direction. We announced several months ago that we're moving to 24 or 5 So we're moving that way.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:26)
So Saturday and Sunday, not?

**Adena Friedman** (3:28)
Not, not for equities yet. I think that we have to, we're walking before we run. But I think that getting to 24 or 5 is a major advancement for the US equities markets. And then on top of that, now with tokenization, if we can introduce that also into the markets, it allows us to really think about streamlining the post-trade processing, bringing and modernizing elements of the markets that have a lot of friction. You know, we are hyper resilient and we're hyper-scaled. You know, we manage, like today, we had 95 billion messages come into our systems today. We had a median, you know, return time of 20 microseconds from order to trade. We handle like 3 million messages a second. It's hugely scaled. But then at the same time, you know, once that trade occurs, there's a different process. And then the post-trade process, as we know, is an area where tokenization really shines. And really cutting down the friction, managing capital flows across the global ecosystem, and really bringing that capability into the market. I'm curious.