To start, let’s replicate upon this previous 12 months. What have been among the most impactful regulatory developments you noticed, and the way have they formed the present market panorama?
It’s been an extremely dynamic 12 months for regulatory developments globally; nevertheless, I really feel that among the most impactful are taking place within the U.S. proper now. In 2025, we’ve got seen the passing of each the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act. The GENIUS Act introduced stablecoins and key digital belongings underneath a unified federal regime. Complementing this, the CLARITY Act clarified the remedy of digital asset as securities or commodities.
Each acts lowered ambiguity for these merchandise and kicked off important rule-making efforts on the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee, Commodity Futures Buying and selling Fee and Federal Reserve, which continued all through 2025. We’ll see lots of the impacts in 2026 with digital belongings coming deeper into the regulatory fold.
As we method 2026, what main traits do you foresee in market regulation?
I really feel the largest lesson over the previous few years for regulators is how they have to be far more proactive within the present surroundings. The tempo of change pushed by know-how and social habits shouldn’t be going to decelerate any time quickly — if something, they’re interacting and changing into extra advanced. As such, I feel in 2026, we’ll see regulators taking extra concrete actions in among the following areas. The interplay of social media and funding will see elevated focus. It’s already properly documented that traders throughout all jurisdictions more and more use social media to make funding selections. We’ve additionally seen extra potential points with telegram buying and selling rings, finfluencers giving dangerous recommendation, and habits resembling copy-trading.
Digital belongings, as talked about above, will see elevated focus in 2026 because of the exercise within the U.S. and maturing laws elsewhere. We’re additionally seeing an elevated regulatory concentrate on algorithmic buying and selling approaches as high-frequency buying and selling (HFT) corporations develop into new markets and regulators fear extra broadly about how synthetic intelligence (AI) will affect markets. This results in the final one, which is that as we see elevated adoption of AI throughout all the monetary sector, we’ll naturally see regulators weighing in additional.
What are essentially the most important regulatory focus areas for 2026, and which do you imagine can have the best impact on market individuals?
One other extra common pattern that we’re seeing is the elevated concentrate on cross-asset, cross-market, cross-border exercise. This can be a results of two issues:
- Firstly, the obstacles to buying and selling have dropped significantly. It’s so a lot simpler than earlier than to commerce throughout nations and there are additionally so many extra merchandise to commerce than beforehand. Because the world has turn out to be far more interconnected, so has buying and selling exercise.
- Secondly, as we’ve got turn out to be higher at catching monetary crime inside a single asset or market or nation, fraudsters are more and more making an attempt to evade regulators by breaking apart their exercise throughout related-assets, a number of markets, and even throughout borders. The vast majority of instances that I’ve written about over the previous 12 months have had some sort of cross-asset/market/border part. Regulators are additionally seeing this pattern, and we’ll see elevated concentrate on this in 2026.
The above can also be the explanation I don’t imagine that crypto needs to be handled individually from a monetary crime perspective. It doesn’t make sense to create one other silo that fraudsters can cross forwards and backwards to keep away from detection.
What recommendation would you give to corporations making ready for potential modifications in market regulation in 2026, and the way can they greatest place themselves for compliance and success?
It’s fairly superb how dynamic monetary regulation has turn out to be. I write a month-to-month e-newsletter, the Nasdaq Regulatory Roundup, the place every month I do a deep dive into a brand new regulatory improvement or novel enforcement case. At first, I used to be nervous there wouldn’t be sufficient taking place, however extra typically, I’m within the place the place it’s onerous to choose which improvement to write down about that month.
Prior to now, compliance groups have been designed as extremely process-driven closed loops, while the present actuality is that each the enterprise and market laws will likely be consistently evolving. From a know-how perspective, this implies it’s worthwhile to concentrate on two issues. Firstly, you want flexibility for progress. I’m consistently requested how we’ll deal with issues like 24×7 buying and selling, HFT exercise, ruleset modifications, and extra — even by corporations that aren’t dealing with this stuff proper now. So, it’s necessary to be proactive.
Secondly, many corporations when confronted with one thing new are inclined to focus an excessive amount of on the shiny new half. Compliance is constructed up on many layers of resiliency, cybersecurity, mannequin administration, governance, and different processes that may find yourself consuming the vast majority of the trouble of a change. When evaluating know-how, it is very important think about all these underlying layers as points at that stage might find yourself dwarfing any advantages.
