Alpaca, a self-clearing broker-dealer that offers stocks, ETFs, options, and fixed income, announced its acceptance as a Nasdaq Exchange Member. This update helps to further strengthen Alpaca’s operations in the US market and reflects its ongoing progression toward building resilient, in-house, full-stack brokerage infrastructure.
Nasdaq membership enables Alpaca to connect directly to the exchange’s order book, offering improved access to its full depth of liquidity and suite of order types.
This milestone adds to Alpaca’s memberships with the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) and the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), along with its DTCC clearing status.
These approvals now aim to enhance the company’s role as a recognized market participant.
Recently, it was also reported that Global Menkul Değerler (GMD), a publicly traded Turkish brokerage firm with experience providing brokerage services to individual and institutional investors, both domestic and international, in the capital markets, announced a partnership with Alpaca.
This collab will help enable GMD clients to diversify their portfolios with global assets, “complementing their domestic holdings.”
Brokers in Turkey have depended on legacy software and white-labelled platforms, resulting in poor trading experiences, higher latency, and limited scalability.
Additionally, the Turkish market has seen “limited growth in foreign holdings of US equities, remaining at $1 billion from 2017 to 2024,” according to a report from the Department of Treasury.
However, as local investors feel the pressure of currency volatility, market uncertainty, and inflation3, the need for “modern brokerage infrastructure and access to foreign equities has increased.”
GMD’s asset class, utilizing Alpaca’s self-clearing broker-dealer operations, will offer access to US equities through the Global On-Line platform.
Through lower minimums and an improved user experience, GMD is helping create more “wealth-building opportunities for their clients.”
As reported earlier this month, AlpacaDB Inc. introduced their Instant Tokenization Network (ITN), which is described as the infrastructure layer enabling institutions to perform “instant in-kind minting and redemption of traditional brokerage-held stocks to their various tokenized counterparts, 24/7.”
Tokenized stocks have gained traction this year. Yet beyond the positive momentum, the market lacks the critical infrastructure to move past “novelty.” So these updates should help address these shortcomings.