Kraken parent gets $100M from Nasdaq in landmark blockchain deal pushing valuation to $21B

The $21 billion valuation for Payward Inc., reported by Bloomberg, follows a $100 million strategic investment from Nasdaq Inc. announced Thursday. This capital injection is among the largest corporate commitments to blockchain-based market structure to date, targeting Payward, the parent company of San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.

Standard U.S. equity markets operate on fixed schedule windows—typically 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time—and rely on centralized clearinghouses. The joint venture between the traditional stock exchange operator and the crypto infrastructure firm is developing Nasdaq Equity Tokens, known as NETs, which will be integrated directly into Payward’s xStocks ecosystem.

Tokenized equities, by contrast, represent digital shares issued on distributed ledgers or smart contract platforms. The format enables continuous, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week trading, instantaneous or real-time settlement (T+0), peer-to-peer transfers between self-hosted digital wallets, and automated corporate actions executed through programmable software. The joint digital asset infrastructure is slated for a formal commercial launch in the second quarter of 2027.

Institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) has expanded rapidly over the past year. Market data from an a16z crypto industry report indicated that the total market capitalization of tokenized equities expanded 400% in the 12 months leading up to June, reaching $1.7 billion.

The initiative follows a crucial regulatory shift by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which approved a rule change allowing Nasdaq to facilitate the trading and settlement of selected equity securities in tokenized form on a blockchain. As part of the technical integration, Payward will embed Nasdaq’s proprietary market surveillance software across its trading venues to detect cross-market manipulation, wash trading, and other transactional abuses.

Subsequent market tracking data from CoinGecko shows the total valuation of the sector has surpassed $2 billion. In March 2024, asset management giant BlackRock introduced its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) on the Ethereum blockchain alongside transfer agent Securitize, bringing tokenized U.S. Treasury bills onto public blockchains and amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in assets within months.

Retail brokerages have also aggressively expanded digital asset offerings internationally, though domestic regulatory hurdles remain. In July, Robinhood Markets Inc. unveiled a feature allowing users across more than 120 foreign jurisdictions to trade blockchain-based stock tokens through its self-custody crypto wallet. That product remains blocked from U.S. residents while regulatory agencies evaluate investor protections, custody requirements, and registration rules under federal securities laws.

A public dispute emerged when movie-theater operator AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. publicly accused Robinhood of facilitating an unauthorized synthetic market tied to AMC shares on its international platform. AMC executives stated that the tokenized derivatives were launched without the corporate issuer’s consent, warning that the products failed to grant buyers voting rights or legitimate legal title to underlying shares.

“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,” Tal Cohen, president of Nasdaq, said in a statement accompanying the announcement.

Robinhood defended the offering, maintaining that regulated brokerages and market makers possess the legal authority to structure secondary financial instruments and price-tracking derivatives referencing publicly traded equities without seeking authorization from the issuing corporations.

Direct competitors to Nasdaq are simultaneously deploying rival tokenization platforms. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced plans in January to build a proprietary trading platform dedicated to tokenized securities and on-chain clearing. Securitize, the SEC-registered transfer agent and alternative trading system, expanded its institutional partnerships to issue native blockchain shares alongside traditional market operators.

In May 2024, the U.S. financial system officially shortened its standard settlement cycle from two business days after a trade (T+2) to one business day (T+1), mandated by SEC rule modifications designed to reduce counterparty credit exposure. The venture represents a major shift in how traditional securities are cleared and settled.

Dinari, the financial technology firm, began offering eligible international and U.S. investors digital tokens backed 1-to-1 by underlying U.S. public stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Industry participants including Coinbase Global Inc., Binance, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC)—which processes trillions of dollars in daily Wall Street transactions—have launched independent research or live technical pilots evaluating distributed ledger settlement systems, such as the DTCC’s Project Ion.

Despite ongoing legal and structural debates over full shareholder rights versus price-exposure derivatives, Nasdaq’s multi-year rollout timeline with Payward indicates that top-tier U.S. market operators are actively moving to convert traditional capital market infrastructure to distributed ledgers ahead of a broader regulatory framework expected later this decade.