Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, and the London Stock Exchange said Monday that they will work together to tokenize UK equities, starting with the 100 largest companies listed in London.
Payward said the tokens, called xStocks, will go live in the coming weeks on Kraken and other platforms in the xStocks alliance. The company said each xStock is backed one for one by a listed share.
According to Payward, holders will be able to keep the tokens on a centralized exchange, in a self-custodied wallet, or inside an onchain application. The tokens can also be traded at any hour.
Payward said the framework has processed $40 billion in total volume in a little over a year, with close to $20 billion of that settled onchain, across more than 200,000 holders. Investors in more than 110 countries will be able to buy the London-listed names. Investors based in the UK will not, because xStocks are not currently available to them.
LSE’s role would come later
The London Stock Exchange said its own leg of the arrangement is further out and conditional. Subject to regulatory approval, the exchange said it would list xStocks and support trading in them on LSE 24, the 24/5 venue it unveiled in July.
LSE 24 is scheduled to open for client testing by the end of 2026 and begin with exchange-traded products in the first half of 2027, with equities to follow after that. The venue will run from 17:00 to 07:50 Monday through Friday, pausing for half an hour for end-of-day processing.
The two firms also said they would explore equity tokens issued natively through the exchange, with the same rights as ordinary shares and full fungibility with them.
Other exchanges are pursuing similar plans
Julia Hoggett, CEO of London Stock Exchange plc and head of digital and securities markets at LSEG, said in a statement: 「Tokenization has the potential to change how investors access, and how issuers use, financial markets, but it must develop in a way that preserves the trust, rights and role of regulated markets.」
Rival venues are pursuing similar models. In March, the New York Stock Exchange signed a memorandum of understanding with Securitize to build a marketplace for round-the-clock trading of tokenized U.S. equities and exchange-traded funds, pending approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi, who outlined the company’s tokenization strategy on Unchained’s podcast last October, said an equity that trades around the clock and reaches investors almost anywhere begins to show what becomes possible when securities move onto blockchain rails.