ICE's Sprecher Bets 24/7 Tokenized Markets and Private Credit Data Will Transform the Exchange — Without a Single Acquisition
Bernstein 42nd Annual Strategic Decisions Conference, May 27, 2026
Jeffrey Sprecher, founder and chairman of Intercontinental Exchange, used his ninth consecutive appearance at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference to lay out a vision for ICE that is more ambitious than most investors appear to appreciate — and more concrete than the market is giving him credit for. The company is already running blockchain settlement tests internally at the New York Stock Exchange, is deep into a private credit data partnership with Apollo, and is pursuing SEC approval for 24/7 tokenized equity trading through a sister ATS. None of this requires a major acquisition. The irony, as Sprecher framed it, is that the market is penalizing ICE for uncertainty around AI and data monetization at precisely the moment the company is building infrastructure to capitalize on both.
The Valuation Disconnect: SaaS Apocalypse or Misunderstood Business?
Bernstein analyst Chinedu Bolu opened by noting the obvious tension: all three ICE segments are growing, EPS is strong, yet the stock trades at a meaningful discount to peers. Sprecher was characteristically blunt about the cause. "I feel like we've been caught up a little bit in the SaaS apocalypse," he said, arguing that investors are genuinely uncertain about how data will be consumed and paid for in an AI world, and how networks like ICE's mortgage infrastructure will evolve. His view is that AI is a tailwind, not a headwind, and that the numbers already prove it. On the conglomerate discount question, Sprecher pushed back with conviction, pointing to a common customer base across all three segments and the trust built through the NYSE as the connective tissue that makes the whole worth more than the sum of its parts.
Energy: A Structural Growth Story That Has No End in Sight
ICE's energy franchise has nearly doubled revenues over three years, and Sprecher sees the conditions for continued growth becoming, if anything, more pronounced. The rewiring of global energy supply chains — driven by Russia-Ukraine, Iran-Hormuz tensions, U.S. export dominance, and Venezuela exposure — is bringing new participants into ICE's markets and driving them to consume more data. "It's not just more volume, but we actually have more participants," he noted, "and those participants in order to manage risk are consuming more data. So there's a flywheel effect."
On benchmarks, Sprecher explained in rare detail how ICE has effectively repositioned Brent crude from a North Sea grade (which no longer exists in meaningful quantity) into "the optimal price of oil on a ship moving around the world." TTF, originally created as a basis trade against the UK gas market, has become the global benchmark for liquefied natural gas at sea. JKM, the Japan-Korea marker, is expected to see significant growth as Asian trade deals rewire gas flows. The message is clear: WTI and Cushing are legacy constructs, and ICE's suite of seaborne benchmarks is where the structural volume growth lies.
Tokenized Equities, OKX, and the 24/7 Market Endgame
The most consequential strategic disclosure at the conference was Sprecher's confirmation that ICE has applied to the SEC to trade tokenized stocks 24/7 through an alternative trading system — a process he described as well advanced and achievable under existing U.S. law, without waiting for the Clarity Act to pass. The distribution partner for this initiative is OKX, the world's second-largest crypto exchange, which Sprecher described as having gone through a meaningful compliance transformation under the Biden administration — paying fines, accepting a monitor, and implementing KYC/AML frameworks. The logic is straightforward: ICE wants to reach Asian retail demand for U.S. equities around the clock; OKX wants a path to FINRA and SEC oversight. Each side gets what it needs.
Sprecher was candid that institutional adoption on day one will be minimal. "There's a broad resistance to trading over the weekends and trading at night, and it's just not how the infrastructure has been set up." But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and ICE is positioning itself to be the regulated infrastructure layer for whatever 24/7 equity trading becomes.
The Polymarket investment, by contrast, is more explicitly a learning exercise. Sprecher described it as ICE helping a true DeFi exchange understand what modifications would be needed for U.S. compliance, while ICE distributes Polymarket data to its institutional client base. He sees prediction markets eventually expanding well beyond sports and politics into economic data — creating new price discovery mechanisms that could sit alongside or interact with legacy exchange markets.
Hyperliquid: Admiration, Not Fear — But a Regulatory Reckoning Is Coming
Sprecher's treatment of Hyperliquid was one of the more revealing moments of the conversation. Far from dismissing the platform, he noted that ICE has met with the team multiple times, called them "extremely smart," and admitted: "I wish I was younger and doing it." Hyperliquid, he pointed out, is bigger than NASDAQ by some measures and runs on eleven people. It has captured real demand by staying open on weekends when traditional energy markets are closed — a gap that has become more visible during Middle East conflict-driven weekend events.
ICE's response is pragmatic: rather than fight weekend hours, the company plans to extend Friday trading very late and open very early on Monday, narrowing the gap without requiring full weekend operations that its institutional client base doesn't want. But the deeper issue Sprecher raised is regulatory. Hyperliquid's core products are, by any traditional definition, swaps subject to Dodd-Frank's Title VII. "Now we call these things perpetual futures and they're highly levered and very liquid," he said. "The regulators have a choice to make." ICE's lobbying position is not to shut these platforms down but to demand a level playing field — if regulators permit it for DeFi venues, they should permit it for ICE.
Sprecher also flagged the SpaceX IPO on June 11 as a potential inflection point for how markets and regulators think about DeFi price discovery. Hyperliquid has already listed a SpaceX derivative, and whether that price influences the IPO outcome will likely determine how quickly regulators are forced to take a position.
Blockchain Settlement: ICE Has Tested It, But Scalability Remains the Bottleneck
Sprecher confirmed that ICE has already connected the New York Stock Exchange to a blockchain settlement system, running it internally in its own data center. "We proved we can do it," he said. The barriers to full deployment are not regulatory or conceptual — they are technical. No current chain can handle ICE's 1.7 trillion daily transactions. Blockchain validation latency is incompatible with microsecond algorithmic trading. His conclusion: blockchain is well-suited to net positions and move collateral near-instantaneously, but not to match the execution speed of modern markets. The practical near-term application is tokenized collateral movement across ICE's six clearing houses, not trade execution itself. This is a more measured and credible framing than most of the tokenization commentary currently circulating in the market.
Mortgage: The AI Tailwind Nobody Expected
The mortgage technology segment has been the most frustrating part of the ICE story for investors, built on the assumption that falling rates would drive refinancing volume. That thesis has not played out. But Sprecher reframed the segment's value proposition in a way that has little to do with rate cycles. ICE's network touches over 90% of U.S. mortgages, which means it has an unparalleled topology of who does business with whom, where loans originate, where they go, and how they are reconstructed in securitization. That data set, he argued, has become the foundational auditable layer that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now explicitly demanding — because they will not accept AI-underwritten mortgages without it.
ICE is working with Anthropic's Claude to build a topology layer across its network that automates workflow not just inside individual companies but across the entire industry. On competitive threats from AI-native entrants like Vesta, Sprecher was dismissive but precise: "Most of this stuff is very, very good if you're dealing with vanilla ice cream." The edge cases — legal foreclosure processes, robo-signature failures, state-by-state regulatory variation — are exactly where regulators focus and where new entrants are least prepared. Fannie and Freddie's explicit stance against AI-underwritten mortgages without an auditable data layer is a meaningful structural moat for ICE's existing network.
Private Credit Data: Apollo as a Beachhead, Not a One-Off
The launch of ICE's private credit data initiative with Apollo as anchor tenant is further along than the market appears to appreciate. ICE has processed approximately 12,000 loan documents covering 1,100 Apollo loans, identifying 350 unique data attributes that define a loan. Of those, roughly 65 are what an investor would need to assess credit quality, and approximately 20 to 25 would need to be updated continuously for secondary market trading purposes. Apollo will selectively allow certain limited partners to access this data set as it marks loans to market.
Sprecher confirmed that most major private credit firms are now in discussions with ICE about replicating this framework. The analogy he drew is instructive: just as floor traders eventually accepted transparency in lit markets, private credit will migrate toward disclosure — partly because LPs will demand it, and partly because firms like Apollo believe the market is mispricing their loan quality. ICE is positioning to be the industry utility for that transparency infrastructure.
Data Centers: Lucky Timing, Now a Durable Advantage
ICE's decision to own its own data centers and build proprietary network infrastructure — made roughly a decade ago when peers were moving entirely to cloud — has become a meaningful revenue contributor and a strategic differentiator. Sprecher was candid that it started as a cost-control decision: cloud expenses were escalating uncontrollably. It has evolved into a co-location business serving algorithmic traders who require guaranteed microsecond data parity, and more recently into a GPU-enabled AI inference platform. ICE now has one data center adjacent to the NYSE data center that is nearly full and a second of similar size that provides years of expansion capacity. Demand from clients wanting access continues to accelerate.
Summary
The picture that emerges from Sprecher's Bernstein presentation is of a company that is structurally better positioned than its current valuation implies, but where the most important catalysts are either misunderstood or not yet visible in reported numbers. The energy franchise has more durable tailwinds than the market credits. The mortgage business is being revalued as a data infrastructure asset rather than a rate-cycle bet. The tokenized equity and private credit data initiatives represent genuinely new revenue streams that are closer to launch than investors appear to assume. And the blockchain settlement work already done internally at the NYSE suggests ICE will not be caught flat-footed when tokenized collateral movement becomes the market standard.
The one honest caveat Sprecher offered throughout is timing. The 24/7 equity trading initiative requires SEC approval and institutional behavioral change. The private credit data platform requires industry-wide adoption beyond Apollo. The mortgage AI opportunity is real but will develop slowly in a heavily regulated environment. None of this is a near-term earnings catalyst. What it is, however, is a coherent and compounding organic growth agenda — which is exactly what Sprecher is promising, and what the market has yet to fully price in.