Nasdaq is putting $100 million into Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, in a deal that values the crypto firm at $21 billion and locks in a plan to launch tokenized versions of Nasdaq-listed stocks with full shareholder voting rights by the second quarter of 2027. The investment, announced Thursday through Nasdaq’s venture arm, deepens a partnership the two companies first laid out in March and signals how seriously legacy exchanges now treat on-chain securities as a core business line rather than an experiment.
The deal has three parts. Nasdaq Ventures invests $100 million for a minority stake. The two companies continue building the Nasdaq Equity Token framework, or NETs, which aims to represent listed equities on blockchain rails. And Payward adopts Nasdaq’s market surveillance technology across all of its trading venues, from crypto to tokenized equities, futures and options.
Why an exchange operator is buying into a crypto exchange
Tal Cohen, president of Nasdaq, framed the move as a bet on how capital will move between markets in the next decade.
“The next era of market evolution will be defined by how efficiently and seamlessly capital and assets move across the financial system with durable liquidity,” Cohen said in the announcement. “This partnership advances our work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens and helps build a more connected financial system while preserving the trust, transparency and integrity that underpin capital formation.”
Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Payward, put the same idea in sharper terms: the goal is to move Nasdaq Equity Tokens “onto rails that do not close, with shareholder rights intact.” That phrase matters. Most tokenized stock products offered by crypto platforms so far carry no voting rights, which has kept them in regulatory gray zones and limited their appeal to traditional asset managers.
Nasdaq has been laying this groundwork for over a year. In September 2025 it filed a proposal with the SEC to allow securities to trade in tokenized form on its own exchange. In August it agreed to buy LeveL Markets, a settlement firm, to support trading outside conventional market hours. The Payward investment extends that strategy from Nasdaq’s own plumbing to a distribution channel with millions of crypto-native users.
What Nasdaq Equity Tokens would actually be
Under the framework described in the filings and announcements, a NET would be a digital representation of a Nasdaq-listed share that keeps the economic and governance rights of the underlying stock: dividends, voting, and the ability to transfer through regulated channels. Kraken would distribute the tokens to its users through its xStocks platform, letting someone hold a tokenized Apple or Nvidia share in the same interface they use for bitcoin.
The companies plan to launch NETs in the second quarter of 2027. Before then, the infrastructure has to clear several hurdles: custody arrangements, settlement finality across the token layer and the traditional depository system, and the surveillance integration announced Thursday.
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Investment | $100 million from Nasdaq Ventures |
| Valuation | $21 billion for Payward |
| Product | Nasdaq Equity Tokens (NETs) on Kraken’s xStocks platform |
| Target launch | Q2 2027 |
| Voting rights | Preserved, matching ordinary listed shares |
| Surveillance | Nasdaq monitoring tech across all Payward venues |
The money behind the deal
The $21 billion valuation is up from the $20 billion Payward was seeking in May, when CoinDesk first reported the fundraising plans. Kraken has never taken the institutional-funding route as visibly as rivals: Crypto.com raised $400 million from Citadel Securities in July at a $20 billion valuation, and Coinbase trades as a public company. Payward remains private, but a Nasdaq balance-sheet investment of this size functions partly as a pre-IPO endorsement.
For Nasdaq, the outlay is small against its market value but strategically loaded. NYSE, its arch-rival, is building its own venue for 24-7 trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs. Intercontinental Exchange, NYSE’s parent, is already the largest shareholder of Polymarket after committing up to $2 billion in 2025 and another $600 million in March. Every major exchange operator has concluded that tokenization is coming and that whoever controls the compliant wrapper controls the flow.
The competitive picture
Kraken is not the only exchange pushing tokenized equities. Robinhood has offered tokenized stocks to European users since mid-2025 and launched its own chain for them, though an ARK Invest analysis this week found Robinhood’s wallet accounts for under 1% of activity on that chain. Ondo Global Markets lists 200 tokenized stocks and ETFs, and MetaMask added them for eligible users outside the US in February. Bybit, Binance and Bitget ran allocations for tokenized SpaceX shares earlier this year before canceling them over a share shortage.
What distinguishes the Nasdaq-Payward plan is the issuer’s involvement. Most tokenized stock products today are synthetic exposures constructed by third parties, with no formal relationship to the company behind the share and no voting mechanism. A NET issued under Nasdaq’s framework would carry the exchange operator’s own regulatory posture, which is why the surveillance agreement is not a footnote: it is the mechanism that lets regulators accept the structure.
What could still go wrong
The timeline runs through at least three quarters of technical and regulatory work. Tokenized securities touch securities law, tax treatment, and insolvency rules that have no settled answers for on-chain assets. The SEC has approved pieces of the puzzle, including Nasdaq’s 2025 filing, but a full framework with voting rights and cross-venue settlement is untested at scale.
Liquidity is the other open question. Tokenized versions of heavily traded stocks only attract volume if they offer something the regular market does not, which in practice means extended-hours and weekend trading. Nasdaq’s purchase of LeveL Markets targets exactly that gap, and Kraken’s 24-7 infrastructure is a natural fit, but whether institutions shift real size onto these rails will not be visible until NETs launch.
There is also the CLARITY Act, the US crypto market-structure bill scheduled for a Senate cloture vote on September 15. Its passage would clarify which regulator oversees which token activity, removing one layer of uncertainty for products like NETs. Its failure would leave the current patchwork in place and could slow the 2027 timeline.
Why it matters beyond two companies
If the structure works, the practical effect is that the boundary between a brokerage account and a crypto wallet becomes a UX choice rather than a legal one. A shareholder in a tokenized Nasdaq stock could vote by proxy, receive dividends, and move the position outside market hours, all under exchange-grade surveillance. That is the version of tokenization that asset managers said they were waiting for, and it is now on a dated roadmap with a $100 million commitment behind it.
Wall Street’s exchange operators have spent two years talking about tokenization. Nasdaq has now spent actual capital on it, attached its brand to a specific product with a launch window, and put its surveillance stack inside a crypto exchange. The bet is that regulated, voting-enabled tokenized equities become the standard, and that the standard should be built by the exchanges rather than around them.