Jackson McGonagle – Meet the Crypto Man Set to Power Nasdaq’s Tokenization Push

Jackson McGonagle has spent his career moving between traditional finance and crypto. Now, he is back at the heart of Wall Street’s market infrastructure – the NASDAQ. He is set to help the American stock exchange Nasdaq advance its digital asset and tokenization strategy.

McGonagle has joined Nasdaq as AVP, Capital Markets Digital Assets Strategy, taking on a role focused on digital assets and tokenization within the exchange operator’s capital markets business.

His career gives him an unusual perspective on the transition. He began at NYSE Euronext, working across equities, options and futures, before moving into crypto as a digital assets trader at Binance in 2018. He later spent nearly three years at Fidelity Digital Assets, before moving into capital formation and strategy roles at Numeus Group and Re7 Capital. There he worked across institutional digital assets and DeFi.

That journey now brings him to Nasdaq at a time when the exchange is moving blockchain technology closer to its core market infrastructure.

Who is Jackson McGonagle, NASDAQ’s Tokenization Executive

“Tokenization sits at the center of that evolution,” McGonagle wrote in a Linkedin post while announcing his move. He describes the opportunity for blockchain to modernize the infrastructure underpinning global capital markets.

For NASDAQ, the strategy is already moving from concept toward production.

In July, Nasdaq participated in a live production event with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), where DTC-tokenized assets were used in production trades on Nasdaq. The exercise demonstrated how tokenized securities could operate within existing market infrastructure rather than requiring a separate blockchain-based market.

Nasdaq is also extending its infrastructure deeper into newer digital markets. Just this week, prediction-market platform Kalshi announced that it would adopt Nasdaq Market Surveillance in a phased rollout. It gives the platform access to cross-market and cross-asset monitoring capabilities across prediction markets and perpetual-style derivatives.

The move is significant beyond surveillance. It shows how infrastructure developed for traditional financial markets is increasingly being adopted by crypto-adjacent and digital-asset businesses as they scale. Nasdaq’s expansion of cross-market surveillance is also becoming increasingly relevant as digital markets mature. NASDAQ head Tony explored this in CoinGape’s earlier feature on why cross-market surveillance is crypto’s missing layer.

What’s Next in NASDAQ’s digital assets strategy

Nasdaq has also consolidated its broader digital-market capabilities under a new Digital Liquidity Networks unit. It is bringing together liquidity platforms, tokenization capabilities and fintech solutions. The restructuring comes alongside an expansion of its digital-assets strategy. It signals that Nasdaq increasingly views blockchain and digital-market infrastructure as part of its wider capital-markets business.

For McGonagle, the role represents a convergence of nearly every stage of his career.

He has experienced traditional exchanges at NYSE, crypto markets at Binance, institutional digital assets at Fidelity and DeFi and capital formation at investment firms. At Nasdaq, those experiences now meet at a market-infrastructure layer where the question is no longer simply whether institutions will use crypto. It is now about whether blockchain will become part of the machinery of traditional finance.

That could make tokenization the next defining chapter of his career and one of Nasdaq’s most consequential bets on the future of capital markets.