Over the past two years, crypto exchanges have tried every possible way to prove they deserve to do business with Wall Street—applying for licenses, hiring executives with traditional-finance backgrounds, and lining up for IPOs. Recently, though, the direction has reversed. On September 10, Nasdaq invested $100 million in Payward, Kraken’s parent company, through its strategic-investment arm, Nasdaq Ventures. This investment is clearly more than a straightforward financial bet: it extends the tokenized-stock partnership the two sides launched in March this year into an equity-level tie.
What distribution rights bought
Under the arrangement announced by both parties, Kraken will distribute Nasdaq’s forthcoming tokenized stocks—Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs—on its platform, with a planned launch in the second quarter of 2027. Under Nasdaq’s current design, NETs will retain the shareholder rights attached to traditional shares, including voting rights. Nasdaq has repeatedly emphasized this distinction, because most tokenized-stock products currently on the market give holders exposure only to price movements, without shareholder rights.
In exchange, Payward agreed to use Nasdaq’s market-surveillance system across all of its trading venues—spot crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures, and options. This market-surveillance technology is already used by exchanges, regulators, banks, and brokerages around the world. Connecting to it looks more like Payward filling in the market-surveillance capabilities needed to align with traditional capital markets as it expands its multi-asset trading business. The legal rights attached to shares, issuer governance, and market rules will remain primarily within the traditional capital-markets system; Kraken and xStocks provide the distribution and infrastructure gateway connecting to crypto-native markets.
The same script, at different depths
Since the start of the year, at least three established exchanges have taken similar steps, but with very different levels of involvement. Deutsche Börse was the first to move. In December 2025, it announced a strategic partnership with Kraken covering regulated crypto, tokenized markets, derivatives, and institutional liquidity. The agreement also provided for Kraken to connect to its FX trading platform 360T and for Eurex derivatives to list on Kraken. The first outcome arrived in February 2026: Kraken’s tokenized-stock product, xStocks, launched on 360X, Deutsche Börse’s regulated trading platform. In April, Deutsche Börse added another $200 million to acquire roughly 1.5% of Payward, turning a partnership that had been operating for four months into an actual equity relationship.
In March, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested $200 million in crypto platform OKX at a $25 billion valuation and obtained a board seat. By June 22, the companies had pushed the partnership a step further, announcing a 50–50 joint venture called OKXICE. It is planned to operate as a licensed broker-dealer and futures commission merchant, giving OKX’s U.S. and overseas clients access to ICE’s futures markets and the NYSE’s tokenized-stock market. That step still awaits regulatory approval and has not yet been implemented.
The three approaches differ in depth, but point in the same direction: none of these firms is building a crypto distribution network from scratch. Instead, they are directly buying stakes in channels that already have real trading volume. Kraken’s tokenized-stock product xStocks has accumulated more than $40 billion in trading volume and more than 200,000 holders; on September 1, the London Stock Exchange also announced that it would tokenize the shares of its 100 largest listed companies by market capitalization and distribute them on the platform. The channel has already proven it can draw traffic. Traditional exchanges only need to buy a portion of it and embed their own rules—much faster than building an entire distribution system for crypto users from the ground up.
A division-of-labor model, or a transitional state
For now, this model—“issuance rights stay on one side, while distribution rights are outsourced to the other”—remains a separate arrangement for Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange, not an industry standard. But the direction is already visible: traditional exchanges no longer see crypto exchanges as opponents to guard against, but as ready-made distribution channels to buy into. Crypto exchanges, in turn, are becoming more proactive in integrating the market infrastructure, regulatory experience, and technological capabilities traditional exchanges already possess into their product systems, rather than building everything from scratch at every stage.
If NETs can indeed launch smoothly in 2027 and voting rights can truly be passed to holders on-chain without loss, this division of labor will likely be copied by more exchanges. Institutions such as Nasdaq, the NYSE, and the London Stock Exchange would continue to safeguard issuance standards and regulatory relationships, while crypto exchanges such as Kraken and OKX would continue to hold the gateway to crypto-native users. Neither side would need to rebuild what the other already has.
That is why this investment matters more than its $100 million size suggests: viewed alongside the moves by Intercontinental Exchange and Deutsche Börse, it is no longer an isolated financing event, but part of a trend this year in which leading exchanges have begun using real money to tie themselves to the users and distribution channels crypto exchanges have already built.
This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.