Nasdaq Wants Crypto Market to Stamp Out Fraud—With Its Help

(Bloomberg) -- The cryptocurrency industry is plagued by scandal. Stock exchange operator Nasdaq Inc. says it can solve the problem.

In a paper released Thursday, the company said it has spent decades developing tools to police securities, currencies and other markets, and can use them to stamp out manipulation and other scams besieging digital coins.

“Regulators, brokers and exchanges have surveillance teams that monitor activity constantly and advanced technologies to help capture and analyze abusive behaviors including pump-and-dump schemes, insider trading, wash trading as well as spoofing and layering,” according to the paper.

Authorities worry that virtual currencies are susceptible to frauds that take advantage quick price swings and a lack of government regulation. In May, Bloomberg reported that the Justice Department had opened a criminal probe into possible manipulation of Bitcoin trading.

Nasdaq licenses its market-surveillance technology to exchanges, including at least one crypto market: Gemini, which was founded by the Winklevoss twins. Nasdaq first started to get approached about these services from crypto companies just over two years ago, but it wasn’t until late last year when Bitcoin was surging that demand jumped.

“We’re now getting approached every week or two,” Tony Sio, Nasdaq’s head of exchange and regulator surveillance, said in an interview. “We won’t work with all of these firms though since a lot of them are quite early stage or not reputable yet,” he added.

To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Verhage in New York at jverhage2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net, Nick Baker, David Scheer

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