Nasdaq is paying to make sure exchanges do not lose ground to markets that never close. The company said on August 11, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire all of LeveL Markets, LLC, the third largest alternative trading system in the United States by volume, folding it into a newly created Digital Liquidity Networks unit. Terms were not disclosed. LeveL processes hundreds of millions of shares a day across more than 7,000 symbols for over 2,500 buy side and sell side clients, with average daily volume up 56 percent year over year in 2025.
Nasdaq already held a minority stake in LeveL since 2021, after the platform’s 2022 merger with Luminex. Taking full ownership now is a bet on what Nasdaq calls its always on markets strategy. Tal Cohen, the company’s president, tied the deal to a market structure where the boundaries between traditional and digital markets continue to converge. Roland Chai, who steps in to lead the new Digital Liquidity Networks group, previously ran Nasdaq’s European market services; Nikolaj Kosakewitsch succeeds him there. LeveL will keep operating as a separate, FINRA regulated ATS rather than being absorbed into Nasdaq’s own exchange, preserving the off exchange execution model its clients rely on.
The original insight: incumbent exchanges are responding to round the clock crypto and tokenized asset trading not by building competing venues from scratch, but by buying the off exchange infrastructure that already handles the volume institutional clients do not want on a lit exchange. ICE’s 5.7 billion dollar purchase of MarketAxess followed the same logic in bond trading, and Circle’s move to buy the largest blockchain patent portfolio in the US shows the same consolidation pattern extending into tokenized settlement rails. Market infrastructure is converging fast, and traditional exchange operators are choosing to buy their way into the always on model rather than compete against it.
Source: Nasdaq
