Nasdaq is tying capital to product rollout plans in the tokenized securities market.
On Sept. 10, Nasdaq said its strategic investment arm, Nasdaq Ventures, has agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken. The two companies also confirmed they will keep building the operating and commercial infrastructure for Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs, with a planned launch in the second quarter of 2027. Payward will integrate Nasdaq’s market surveillance technology into its venue across crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures, and options.
Bloomberg reported the same day, citing people familiar with the matter, that the round implies a valuation of about $21 billion for Payward.
xStocks already has scale
The partnership traces back to a product announcement in the first half of 2026. At the time, Nasdaq and Payward said they would build an “equity transformation gateway” using Payward’s xStocks framework to connect regulated permissioned markets with permissionless on-chain networks in eligible jurisdictions.
Payward laid out its role in specific terms. In eligible regions, it would initially serve as the primary settlement layer for NETs, while Payward Services would handle KYC and AML. Nasdaq, for its part, would handle issuer-led equity token design, using digital instruments to represent shares in listed companies while aiming to preserve the regulatory framework, governance rights, and market protections associated with traditional securities.
In that earlier statement, the companies said NETs and related DLT services were expected to begin operating in the first quarter of 2027. The September update pushed that timeline back by one quarter, to the second quarter of 2027.
Payward’s RWA product is xStocks. According to the latest Dune data cited in the report, xStocks has generated more than $25 billion in cumulative trading volume, more than $4 billion in on-chain settlement, and more than 85,000 holders.
Earlier in September, Payward and the London Stock Exchange said they would turn the 100 largest companies on the LSE by market value into 1:1-backed xStocks.
The company had also struck a similar tie-up before that. In December 2025, Deutsche Boerse Group and Kraken / Payward announced a partnership focused on regulated crypto, tokenized markets, and derivatives. Then, on April 14, 2026, Deutsche Boerse said it would buy $200 million worth of Payward shares in the secondary market, giving it roughly a 1.5% fully diluted stake, subject to regulatory approval at closing.
The project now sits under Nasdaq’s DLN unit
The Sept. 10 statement placed the collaboration under Digital Liquidity Networks, or DLN, the unit Nasdaq set up in August. Its mandate is what Nasdaq describes as “24/7 market infrastructure.”
In the statement, Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi focused on the inefficiencies in the traditional clearing and settlement system. U.S. stock clearing handles more than $2 trillion a day, and after netting, about 2% remains. Clearinghouses still need to post $10 billion to $20 billion in collateral against those residual positions and wait another day for settlement. He also said the 2024 shift from T+2 to T+1 released about $3 billion in one-time capital. The next step, in his words, is to place NETs on a “24/7 trading network” while fully preserving the governance rights and regulatory protections of traditional securities.
IPO timeline slips again
Kraken began public operations in 2013. Its parent company is Payward.
In November 2025, Payward said it had completed $800 million in financing across two tranches. The first was led by institutional investors including Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital, HSG, Tribe Capital, and the Sethi family office, among others. That was followed by a $200 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities, at a $20 billion valuation. The company said the capital would be used to bring traditional financial products on-chain, expand trading, payments, and tokenized assets, and support growth in Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Its IPO plans, however, have kept slipping as the crypto market moved into a bear market. In March 2026, Reuters and other outlets reported that Payward had paused its IPO because of market conditions. In September this year, CoinDesk, citing two people familiar with the matter, said the earliest listing timeline had moved to the second quarter of 2027.
Polymarket’s latest data currently shows the market assigning just a 4% chance to a Kraken IPO this year.
Nasdaq is taking a position in tokenized equities
As presented in the report, Nasdaq’s $100 million commitment is aimed at three things that have already been tested in the market: a distribution and settlement rail in xStocks that has produced real volume, a gateway structure that can move NETs from permissioned markets into restricted on-chain environments, and a way to extend Nasdaq’s own surveillance standards into a platform that is building out multiple asset classes.
DLN’s goal of round-the-clock liquidity remains a strategic plan if it stays at the departmental level. Connected to Payward’s retail access points and on-chain settlement layer, it has a path to becoming a product with a target launch window in the second quarter of 2027.
The report also said traditional exchange groups in 2026 are no longer stopping at pilot programs. ICE and OKX are discussing a joint-venture entry point, the London Stock Exchange is working on tokenizing its listed shares, and Deutsche Boerse has already become a shareholder. In that context, Nasdaq’s move looks more like a positioning play in the competition over market rails than a symbolic endorsement of the crypto sector.
xStocks still carries clear restrictions for U.S. users, and a tokenized stock does not automatically equal one share held in a U.S. brokerage account. Kraken, meanwhile, has been shifting from a spot crypto exchange toward a multi-asset platform. The next question is less about how much capital it can still raise and more about how many issuers will be willing to issue tokens under a framework where the rights remain intact when NETs go live in the second quarter of 2027, and in which jurisdictions those tokens can actually be bought, transferred, and voted.
