NYSE and Nasdaq, OKX and Kraken & xStocks are two branches on this big tree of stock tokenization trading.
In the past week, the density of news has not felt like the natural evolution of the market, but more like a tacit collective reveal. First, the Intercontinental Exchange made a strategic investment in #OKX, acquiring a stake at a $25 billion valuation and securing a board seat.
Three days later, Nasdaq announced a partnership with #Kraken's parent company Payward to build a new infrastructure for stock tokenization together. Both giants are laying out plans in the stock tokenization market, but do they want the same thing?
PS: Kraken has already acquired Backed, which is behind xStocks.
From my personal perspective, although they look quite similar, their business focus is different.
To start with the similarities, both traditional exchanges offer a regulated market, compliance for stock sales, a rule system, and issuer relations, while cryptocurrency exchanges offer "channels," "users," and on-chain distribution capabilities.
In simple words, traditional exchanges are not running off to become cryptocurrency exchanges themselves, but are leveraging the existing user networks of cryptocurrency exchanges to sell U.S. securities assets to markets that traditional brokers find difficult to efficiently reach.
The Intercontinental Exchange is providing U.S. futures market assets and the NYSE tokenized equity market, while Nasdaq aims to link the equity token design with Kraken's and xStocks' on-chain systems.
What both NYSE and OKX, or Nasdaq and Kraken, as well as #xStocks are providing is not merely a token representation of stocks, but framing the buying and selling of stocks as stablecoins as the main narrative to enable stock tokenization trading, settlement, custody, and distribution.
The first difference is the depth of collaboration.
The Intercontinental Exchange and OKX partnership not only involves collaboration, but includes equity investment, a board seat, and broader strategic synergies going forward. This means that the Intercontinental Exchange does not see OKX merely as a regular channel but as an important component of its own digital asset business layout.
In contrast, Nasdaq and Kraken’s current collaboration appears more like a product and infrastructure partnership, focusing on jointly developing an equity conversion gateway that allows future stock tokenized assets to flow between regulated markets and on-chain.
In simpler terms, the collaboration between the Intercontinental Exchange and OKX resembles a deeply integrated strategic partnership, while the collaboration between Nasdaq and Kraken seems more like a joint offensive and defensive maneuver among three companies.
The second difference is in business lines.
The Intercontinental Exchange and OKX involve one side using OKX's spot prices to launch regulated futures, while on the other hand bringing the Intercontinental's U.S. futures market and NYSE's stock tokenization market to OKX's global users. So, they are not just doing stock tokenization, but packaging data, futures, stocks, and market entry together.
In contrast, Nasdaq and Kraken are clearly more focused, centering their core mission on how to connect Nasdaq's future equity token design with Kraken’s and xStocks’ on-chain systems. They concentrate on the compliant sales field of stock tokenization.
Simply put, the collaboration between the Intercontinental Exchange and OKX encompasses the entire U.S. stock market, including derivatives, focused on compliance-based centralized sales and distribution, while Nasdaq and Kraken, along with xStocks, emphasize compliant and distributed sales in both centralized and decentralized environments.
Nasdaq provides a compliant issuer framework, Kraken offers a centralized user platform, and xStocks provides a decentralized user platform on-chain.
This highlights the importance of xStocks. According to data released by Kraken, xStocks has accumulated trading volume of over $25 billion in less than a year, with more than $4 billion being settled on-chain, and over 85,000 holders of stocks on-chain. Additionally, xStocks currently supports 24/7 on-chain trading.
From this perspective, the partnership between Nasdaq and Kraken can accelerate the push of stock tokenized assets to users. For users, there is no need to change systems and they can hold more compliant U.S. stock tokenized assets in their existing on-chain and trading platform environments.
A crucial point is that previously xStocks did not grant users voting rights or other traditional shareholder rights after stock tokenization; it was more like an on-chain exposure to the prices of the underlying stocks. The collaboration with Nasdaq aims to advance from a mapping of “only price exposure” towards retaining true stock rights as much as possible.
This means that through Nasdaq's compliance, xStocks will have the opportunity to upgrade to become a formal U.S. stock distribution on-chain platform. That is why I think xStocks is the most critical aspect of this collaboration.
The end.
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