Just a few days ago, Coinbase, one of the crypto market’s best-known companies, held its initial public offering (IPO). This entails the sale of shares and the listing of the aforementioned company on a publicly-traded stock exchange. Companies often do this to usher in veritable cash flow that is then utilised to expand by building new products and enhancing the ones that are already available. Coinbase is therefore one of the first crypto companies to ever go public, but it’s recent endeavour may pave the way to numerous other crypto-based businesses taking similar steps. 

It’s very likely that over the next few years, as crypto companies scale, there’ll be considerable opportunity to purchase crypto stock, some of which will likely be tradeable within blockchains as synthetic assets. This is exactly what Binance did for Coinbase’s $COIN ticker, but also for Tesla. 

In the last couple of months, banks and other financial institutions have shown a growing interest in bitcoin and its underlying technology, the blockchain. In fact, NASDAQ has recently reported making their first share sale transaction with the help of the technology.

For those who are not yet aware, the blockchain is basically a public ledger which records and transmits a series of digital events, while also using cryptography to verify blocks of data. Once this is done, they are then distributed among the parties, thus enabling transactions to take place, be verified and relayed. Perhaps one of the main benefits of the system is the fact that transactions take place nearly simultaneously, instead of requiring people to wait for hours or days. Together with this, all afferent data is stored publicly, where it can be verified by anyone interested.

The idea of using Bitcoin alongside with the Blockchain technology that backs it to trade shares has been considered before, but it is now being put into an actual project, as reports indicate. With this in mind, it seems like the Nasdaq OMX Group has named Chain as its partner for the pilot project that was announced a couple of months back, and which would provide the needed technology for trading of shares in all types of private companies.

Understanding how this is supposed to work can turn out to be a bit difficult, but we’ll try to explain it as well as possible. To kick things off, Chain is a company that provides infrastructure to financial institutions which want to use the Blockchain for all sorts of transactions, as it allows users to digitally transfer money along with digital assets securely, directly and nearly instantly, which is great news from all the points of view.

Since Bitcoin went mainstream, a large number of people have begun questioning whether the currency could also be used in the trading of shares in private companies on the stock market. So far, many people stayed away from the idea because of the volatile nature of the cryptocurrency, but the stock exchanges operator NASDAQ OMX Group is a strong Bitcoin believer, which is currently evaluating Blockchain, in order to see if the technology behind the digital currency can actually be used for trading.