Lost amid large headlines about the NYSE Euronext vs. Nasdaq OMX Holy War,  one-year  anniversary of the Flash Crash, and the market structure regulatory debate: The 10th birthday of Liquidnet. Happy Birthday!

Liquidnet is hardly a household name. But it is certainly well known on Wall Street as an independent provider of access to dark pools. In many ways, it is the pioneer among the independents, which are really struggling against the internalized dark pools.  

In honor of its milestone, the New York company has issued a press release with predictions from 10 top experts about the financial markets. The firm modestly included a prediction from its own CEO Seth Merrin: "10 years from now, technology will help make institutional investing around the world easy and efficient. Today's siloed markets, myriad regulatory differences and technology barriers to investing globally will be overcome with new technology solutions. This will expand the number of opportunities in which institutional investors can invest from just the 5,000 companies in the U.S. to approximately 45,000 public companies around the world."

This is basically a nice articulation of Liquidnet's ambitions. It does not want to be known as merely a provider of access to two dark pools, even though that is how many people know it. It aims to be a much broader provider of financial services, one that spans the globe. It recently launched services in Mexico and Poland; it now provides services in 39 markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America. And it certainly wants to do more than facilitate large trades for funds via dark pools.

Indeed, Liquidnet has recently launched a new business to offer new services to publicly traded companies planning major share transactions like buybacks, follow-on sales or even initial public offerings, reports Dow Jones. The new businesses help the firm with its ambitions to diversify away from its core market. "To us, the problems that corporates had were eerily similar to the problem that institutions had," one executive told the news service. "They're trying to build up or unwind a very big position without impacting the market."

The need to diversify is plain to many. Liquidnet's market share, which has never been high, has basically been stuck below 0.3 percent of U.S. volume. It may even be declining. Certainly, it is no picnic trying to compete with the big internalized dark pools, like Credit Suisse's Crossfinder and Goldman Sachs' Sigma X. The financial crisis has not been kind to it. In fact, the company had plans for an IPO in 2008, but those plans have been on hold ever since.

Some think the time is ripe, however, for such plans to be reignited. Even as the company searches for another cash cow, its margins have held up. An IPO this year would not be out of the question. It may be preparing. It recently pared its headcount 12 percent, to get expenses in order. It has also settled a bitter patent dispute with rival Investment Technology Group. - Jim