Nasdaq invests 100 million dollars in Kraken's parent company, both parties advancing cooperation on tokenized stock. Deutsche Börse and Intercontinental Exchange have also invested in the crypto platform, traditional exchanges acquiring crypto channels to jointly build a tokenized stock ecosystem.

Written by: Conflux

In the past two years, crypto exchanges have exhausted all means to prove their worthiness to interact with Wall Street—applying for licenses, hiring executives with traditional finance backgrounds, and lining up for IPOs. Recently, however, the direction has reversed. On September 10, Nasdaq, through its strategic investment department Nasdaq Ventures, invested 100 million dollars in Kraken's parent company Payward. This investment is clearly not just a simple financial bet but further extends the binding of equity-level cooperation initiated by both parties on tokenized stocks earlier this March.

What Was Exchanged for Distribution Rights

According to the arrangement announced by both parties, Kraken will distribute Nasdaq's upcoming tokenized stocks (Nasdaq Equity Tokens, abbreviated as NETs) on its platform, which is planned to be launched in the second quarter of 2027. According to the design currently released by Nasdaq, NETs will retain shareholder rights corresponding to traditional stocks, including voting rights—this is the key difference Nasdaq emphasizes, as most tokenized stock products currently on the market only provide holders with exposure to price fluctuations without attaching shareholder rights.

In exchange, Payward agreed to adopt Nasdaq's market surveillance system across all its trading scenarios—spot crypto, stocks, tokenized stocks, futures, and options. This market surveillance technology has already been adopted by many exchanges, regulatory agencies, banks, and brokerages worldwide; integrating this system is seen more as Payward enhancing its market surveillance capabilities to align with traditional capital markets while expanding multi-asset trading operations. Legal rights of the shares, issuer governance, and market rules still primarily reside within the traditional capital market system; what Kraken and xStocks provide is the distribution and infrastructure entry connecting the crypto native market.

The Same Script, Different Depths

Since the beginning of this year, at least three established exchanges have been involved in similar activities, but the depth of involvement varies significantly.

The earliest mover was Deutsche Börse. In December 2025, it announced a strategic cooperation with Kraken covering compliant crypto, tokenized markets, derivatives, and institutional liquidity, while also agreeing for Kraken to access its forex trading platform 360T and for Eurex derivatives to go live on Kraken. In February 2026, the first result materialized: Kraken's tokenized stock product xStocks was launched on Deutsche Börse’s compliant trading platform 360X. In April, Deutsche Börse added another 200 million dollars, acquiring approximately 1.5% of Payward's stake, turning this four-month-running cooperation into an actual equity relationship.

In March, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested 200 million dollars in the crypto trading platform OKX, corresponding to a valuation of 25 billion dollars, while also securing a board position. By June 22, the two companies advanced their cooperation further by announcing the establishment of a 50-50 joint venture named OKXICE, which plans to operate as a licensed broker-dealer and futures broker, intending to provide OKX's U.S. and overseas clients access to ICE futures markets and the NYSE tokenized stock market—this step still awaits regulatory approval and has not yet materialized.

Three different strategies, varying in depth, yet all heading in the same direction: none built their own crypto distribution networks from scratch but rather bought stakes in existing channels with actual trading volumes. Kraken's tokenized stock product xStocks has seen a cumulative trading volume exceeding 40 billion dollars, with over 200,000 holders; on September 1, the London Stock Exchange also announced that it would tokenize the stocks of its 100 largest listed companies and distribute them on the platform. The channels have already generated traffic; traditional exchanges only need to acquire a part of the shares of these channels and embed their own rules into them—this is much faster than building an entire distribution system targeting crypto users from scratch.

Division of Labor Model or Transitional State

This model of "retaining issuance rights on one hand, outsourcing distribution rights on the other" is currently just a separate arrangement between Nasdaq and the Intercontinental Exchange and has not yet formed an industry standard. But the direction is already visible: traditional exchanges no longer view crypto exchanges as adversaries to be guarded against but as ready-made distribution channels to purchase; crypto exchanges are also starting to actively incorporate the existing market infrastructure, regulatory experience, and technical capabilities of traditional exchanges into their product systems, instead of building from scratch at every step.

If NETs can indeed launch smoothly in 2027 and if voting rights can truly be transmitted to holders on-chain without loss, this division of labor is likely to be replicated by more exchanges—institutions like Nasdaq, the NYSE, and the London Stock Exchange will continue to maintain issuance standards and regulatory relationships, while crypto exchanges like Kraken and OKX will preserve the entry points to reach crypto native users, allowing both sides to avoid having to recreate what the other already possesses.

This is also why this investment appears more significant than its 100 million dollar scale: seen alongside the actions of the Intercontinental Exchange and Deutsche Börse, this is no longer an isolated financing; rather, it marks the beginning of major exchanges using real capital to bind themselves with the users and channels accumulated with crypto exchanges throughout this year.