On Friday, StockTwits Added Streams and Symbology for 100+ Cryptocurrencies and Tokens. It is really cool.

Justin Paterno (Stocktwits COO) reminded of the backstory of this launch.

Way back in 2010 I had this idea that private companies should have tickers just like public companies.

Bitcoin was probably under $1 and tokens were just a dream…

I had the Stocktwits team code it up and we hustled to get private companies to try and adopt the language.

I knew Twitter and Zynga would go public for example and thought they should have ticker symbols that people could use to chat on the social webs.

I went to the Nasdaq first as a partner and they just looked at me funny.

Barry Silbert thought it was a good idea and at the time he was running his last startup Second Market. We partnered on rolling it out.

I explained it to Fred Wilson as well and he thought it was a great idea. Here is his post explaining it better than I could at the time.

It never really took off (not Fred’s fault).

Ironically, Nasdaq eventually acquired Second Market and Barry went on to found the Digital Currency Group. He is all smiles from this Bitcoin trend and will still take my calls.

I was a tad early and a few degrees off.

Here we are in 2017 and billions are being invested in the Cryptocurrency and token space. They are THE new form of public markets/asset class and now traders, investors and founders can talk about them all day long using .x and ticker symbols we create on Stocktwits.

As an example here is Bitcoin – $BTC.X

I guess there really are no bad ideas!