Nasdaq’s chief executive Adena Friedman is feeling bullish on cryptocurrency. Nasdaq has been exploring the likes of launching Bitcoin futures and once the market is more mature even a cryptocurrency exchange.

Adena Friedman is an American businesswoman who is currently serving as the president and CEO of Nasdaq. She was a managing director and CFO of The Carlyle Group.

She highlighted on CNN’s podcast Boss Files that cryptocurrency is ‘right next step in the space of currency’ due to the global nature of payments it allows which will help cross-border payments.

“How it evolves and which of the cryptocurrencies may or may not be the one that ultimately gets embraced, I think that really the jury is still out on that. But I do think the idea of a more globalized payment mechanism that is more efficient than what we have today allows for money to transfer across countries and certainly supports the Internet economy,” Friedman said.

Friedman has cleared that Nasdaq is a firm supporter of cryptocurrencies with an openness to listing cryptocurrencies on one of the trading platforms.

She further added that Blockchain technology would, in fact, help the banks by stating, “takes a lot of risk out of the system and therefore it makes it so that the banks don’t have to be as capital intensive. And that’s a big incentive.”

Blockchain technology is slowly transforming the financial system with improvements to efficiency and to lower regulations which constitute a significant threat to faster economic growth.

“The first uses of the blockchain will be in the less regulated markets, less efficient markets, more bespoke markets. Test it out, show that it works, demonstrate the efficiency in the Nasdaq private market or in the fund industry. It takes a village to make it work, but people are going to be highly motivated if we show that the use cases bring a lot of efficiency,” Friedman said regarding the slow implementation of Blockchain.

Friedman believes that Blockchain has a great future given that a majority of the people including governments supports it wholeheartedly.

Friedman highlighted how technology needs to evolve to make a difference to the financial sector.

“We see technology as a relentless change agent and our job is to embrace that change, to bring it to the industry, and make it so that our industry continues to be a very successful industry in the next decade or even beyond that,” Friedman confidently said.

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