Nasdaq has announced an integration of its Calypso risk and collateral platform and trade surveillance system with Talos, an institutional digital asset infrastructure firm. The partnership, revealed on Monday, is designed to give institutional clients a unified workflow for managing tokenized collateral and monitoring both crypto and traditional assets for signs of market abuse. Nasdaq’s internal research estimates that roughly $35 billion in collateral is currently tied up in corrective and non-interest-bearing measures, a bottleneck the integration aims to address.
Through the deal, Talos clients will gain access to Nasdaq’s trade surveillance capabilities, enabling them to run alerts for manipulative practices such as wash trading, spoofing, and layering across the venues they use. Both companies say the partnership is intended to bring institutional-grade compliance standards to digital asset markets. The announcement reflects growing demand among institutional participants for more robust oversight tools as they expand into crypto and tokenized assets.
The push for stronger compliance comes against a backdrop of well-documented misconduct in the crypto industry. In 2020, Canadian exchange Coinsquare admitted to conducting artificial wash trades that made up more than 90% of its reported trading volume, resulting in a settlement with the Ontario Securities Commission and the removal of senior executives. Two years later, the collapse of US-based exchange FTX exposed how a platform that promoted sophisticated risk management had allegedly granted a related company an unlimited line of credit and exemptions from key controls.
More recent data underscores that the problem persists. In January 2025, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported that suspected wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes continued to account for significant volumes across decentralized finance pools, and that illicit crypto activity reached nearly $51 billion in 2024. These findings highlight the scale of the challenge that Nasdaq and Talos are seeking to tackle through their combined offering.
Talos serves a range of institutional clients, including hedge funds and brokers. The company extended its Series B funding round by $45 million in January, bringing the total to $150 million at a valuation of approximately $1.5 billion. Backers in the round include Robinhood Markets and BNY.
The Nasdaq-Talos deal arrives as interest in tokenization accelerates across the financial industry. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stated in his 2026 annual shareholder letter that tokenization is updating the infrastructure of the financial system and may be at a stage comparable to the internet in 1996, suggesting that blockchain-based representations of assets could widen market access and reduce costs. His comments reflect a broader shift in sentiment among major financial institutions toward digital asset infrastructure.
Nasdaq and Talos are not the only players pursuing this opportunity. Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is developing a blockchain-based platform for around-the-clock trading of tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds. Meanwhile, global asset manager Franklin Templeton is expanding its tokenized US government money market funds and collateral programs aimed at institutional clients, signaling that competition in the space is intensifying.
Originally reported by CoinTelegraph.
