Nasdaq and Boerse Stuttgart Group are joining forces to develop a pan-European settlement infrastructure for tokenized securities. The partners aim to accelerate and reduce the cost of post-trade operations through the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT).
Nasdaq announced a strategic partnership with Boerse Stuttgart Group. As part of the collaboration, Nasdaq’s European trading venues will be connected to Seturion, a new settlement platform developed by Boerse Stuttgart Group for transactions involving tokenized assets. The initiative is intended to enable trading and settlement of tokenized instruments.
In the first stage, the project will focus on structured products. At a later stage, the partners plan to expand the range of participants, including issuers, brokers, and financial institutions, forming a unified network for trading and settling tokenized securities across Europe.
Seturion is positioned as an open platform for all market participants. It supports settlements across all asset classes on both public and private distributed ledgers. The system also allows for cash settlement either in central bank money or in digital form directly within the blockchain environment.
The cooperation is aimed in particular at addressing one of the key challenges of European capital markets, fragmentation of post-trade infrastructure. The European Union currently operates numerous national settlement systems and differing legal regimes, which increase costs, lengthen settlement times, and complicate transactions. The partners intend to build a single settlement platform fully compliant with European regulations, including the MiFID II directive and the DLT Pilot regime.
According to Roland Chai, President of European Market Services and Head of Digital Assets at Nasdaq, tokenization creates an opportunity to eliminate inefficiencies in settlement processes while maintaining market reliability and regulatory transparency. He noted that the company views the project as part of a broader strategy to modernize infrastructure across trading, clearing, settlement, risk management, and collateral management.
Dr. Matthias Voelkel, CEO of Boerse Stuttgart Group, stated that Seturion is being developed as a pan-European settlement platform capable of overcoming national barriers and bringing the EU closer to establishing a unified capital market. He described Nasdaq’s integration as the first major step toward scaling the project.
Seturion CEO Dr. Lidia Kurt said that traditional post-trade infrastructure no longer meets the requirements of the digital economy. According to her, the new platform is designed to reduce operational costs, lower settlement complexity, and deliver greater efficiency in transaction processing.
The partners expect to accelerate the development of a pan-European ecosystem for trading and settling tokenized assets by bringing market participants together on a single technological foundation. According to a forecast by Moody’s, blockchain solutions are expected to establish themselves by 2026 as a core infrastructure for institutional financial markets across various areas, from settlement and liquidity management to asset issuance and servicing.
