Nasdaq Invests $100M in Kraken Parent Payward at $21 Billion Valuation

A Stock Exchange Giant Buys Into a Crypto Exchange

Nasdaq’s venture arm has agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, the parent company of the crypto exchange Kraken, in a deal valuing the business at $21 billion. The investment was announced on September 10 and ranks among the largest direct bets a traditional exchange operator has placed on a crypto trading platform.

The money is not a passive stake. It funds a joint build, in which Kraken will distribute tokenized versions of Nasdaq-listed stocks, and Payward will run Nasdaq’s market surveillance technology across its crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures and options venues.

For an industry kept at arm’s length by Wall Street for a decade, the direction of travel has flipped. One of the world’s largest stock exchange operators is now paying to build inside it.

What Nasdaq Equity Tokens Actually Are

The product at the centre of the deal is the Nasdaq Equity Token, or NET. It is a blockchain-based representation of a real listed share, designed to trade on crypto rails while tracking the underlying stock.

Here is the mechanism in plain terms. When someone buys an ordinary share, a chain of brokers, clearing houses and custodians records who owns what, and settlement typically takes a business day or more. A tokenized share moves that ownership record onto a blockchain, so a transfer can settle in minutes and the market can stay open outside traditional trading hours.

The detail that separates NETs from earlier attempts is voting rights. The tokens are designed to carry the same shareholder voting rights as shares traded on Nasdaq’s main venue, rather than serving as a price tracker with no claim attached.

Kraken’s Numbers Behind the $21 Billion Price Tag

Payward reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year over year, alongside $310 billion in platform volume and about $40 billion in customer assets. Profit told a harsher story, with adjusted earnings down 71% to $23 million as spot trading volumes fell 13%.

The $21 billion figure is only a modest step up from the $20 billion valuation set in November 2025. That gap suggests investors are paying for the tokenization roadmap rather than for a boom in trading fees.

Nasdaq is also not the first exchange operator through the door. Deutsche Boerse invested $200 million in Payward in April, and Kraken has agreed to a deal with the London Stock Exchange to offer 24/5 trading in tokenized UK stocks from 2027.

Payward filed confidentially for a US listing in November 2025 and paused the process in March as market conditions weakened. Fresh capital at a higher valuation reduces the pressure to rejoin that queue quickly.

Wall Street’s Tokenization Race Is Getting Crowded

Tokenized equities remain a small market, but a fast-moving one. The sector grew roughly 400% over the past year to $1.7 billion by June and now sits above $2 billion, with RWA.xyz data putting the wider tokenized stock total at $2.9 billion, up 7.4% in the past month.

Rivals are already live. Coinbase put Apple, Nvidia and Meta stocks on its Base network earlier this year, while Robinhood has offered tokenized US equities to European customers and is still waiting on regulators for a domestic version.

That competition is showing up in how platforms chase users, with fee cuts, staking products and crypto rewards increasingly used to keep traders on one venue rather than another.

Why Regulators Had to Move First

None of this was possible on US soil until the rulebook changed. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved a Nasdaq rule change permitting certain securities to trade and settle in tokenized form, which is what gives the NET design a legal route to market.

Nasdaq president Tal Cohen framed the investment as infrastructure work rather than a crypto wager. “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,” he said, as reported by Fortune.

Can Tokenized Stocks Deliver by Q2 2027?

The companies expect to launch NETs in the second quarter of 2027, which leaves roughly 18 months of building, testing and regulatory review before anyone trades one.

Market observers note that the token itself is rarely the hard part. Liquidity has to be deep enough for a tokenized Apple share to trade close to the real one, and market makers have to be willing to quote prices around the clock. If those conditions are not met, the product could end up thinly traded, the trap that has limited earlier tokenized stock experiments.

The market backdrop is not making the case easier either. Bitcoin was trading near $76,800, down about 1.5% on the day, according to CoinGecko, as broader crypto prices slipped on inflation data and rising bond yields. Deals of this kind tend to be judged over years rather than weeks.

Traditional Finance Is Now Building Inside Crypto

The pattern of the past year has been steady rather than dramatic. A $13 trillion broker moved to add altcoin trading, a German exchange operator bought into Kraken, and now the operator of the Nasdaq is funding the plumbing to move its own listed shares onto a blockchain.

What is being tokenized here is not a new asset. It is Apple, Microsoft and every other Nasdaq name, wrapped in a format that settles faster and trades longer. If that format works, the interesting question shifts from whether crypto reaches Wall Street to how much of Wall Street ends up running on crypto infrastructure.

For now it is a $100 million cheque and a 2027 promise. The next 18 months will show whether tokenized equities become a genuine market-structure upgrade or an expensive parallel venue that never gains depth.