Nasdaq said on Sept. 10 that Nasdaq Ventures, its strategic investment arm, has agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken. The two companies also plan to expand their work on tokenized equities, including Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs, and the infrastructure needed for 24-hour markets. Nasdaq said NETs could launch as early as the second quarter of 2027.
The partnership is not being framed as a simple effort to package U.S. stocks into tokens. Nasdaq is targeting what it sees as the biggest gap between today’s tokenized shares and actual equity ownership: shareholder rights.
Nasdaq wants tokenized shares to carry shareholder rights
When Nasdaq outlined the NETs structure in March, it said the model would keep listed companies at the center of the system. The design, as described by Nasdaq, would preserve the existing regulatory framework, issuer control, and the rights attached to the original shares after tokenization. It would also bring proxy voting, corporate actions, and shareholder interaction into an on-chain structure.
That is a key distinction from xStocks now trading on Kraken. Existing xStocks are backed 1:1 by underlying shares and give investors price exposure to U.S. stocks such as Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia. But Kraken’s own risk disclosure states that xStocks holders do not directly own the underlying shares and do not have the legal voting rights of the underlying companies or claims to residual assets in liquidation.
In other words, Nasdaq and Payward are building a tokenized stock structure that could preserve the governance rights of traditional shares in the future, rather than turning existing xStocks into instruments with full voting rights.
xStocks trading volume has passed $40 billion
Nasdaq’s decision to invest more deeply in Payward also comes as xStocks has expanded quickly. Since launching in June 2025, the product has posted rapid growth. Payward said in July that the platform had more than 500 xStocks, cumulative trading volume above $35 billion, and close to 200,000 holders.
By early September, Payward-related materials showed cumulative trading volume had climbed above $40 billion. Nearly $20 billion of that total had been settled directly on-chain.
The broader tokenized equity market is growing as well. RWA.xyz data as of Sept. 10 showed on-chain "Distributed" tokenized stocks at about $2.91 billion, up 7.43% over the past 30 days. Monthly transfer volume stood at about $13.31 billion, with roughly 3.17 million holder addresses.
Among major platforms, xStocks had about $628 million in on-chain asset value, ranking third behind Ondo at about $850 million and bStocks at about $643 million.
Market talk put Payward’s valuation at about $21 billion
Market sources also indicated that the Nasdaq investment valued Payward at about $21 billion, though that figure did not appear in Nasdaq’s official announcement.
Payward’s latest financial figures showed adjusted revenue of $508 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA was $23 million. Total platform trading volume was about $310 billion, assets on the platform were about $40 billion, and funded accounts rose 42% from a year earlier to 6.6 million.
Payward said that while overall crypto spot trading had cooled, its stocks and tokenized stocks business kept growing. Asset-based and other revenue also increased as a share of total revenue, rising from 55% a year earlier to 60%.
Nasdaq is aiming at round-the-clock capital markets
The significance of the $100 million investment goes beyond a traditional exchange taking a stake in a crypto company. In the next phase of the partnership, Nasdaq and Payward plan to build issuance, trading, settlement, and interoperability infrastructure connecting NETs and xStocks. Payward will also introduce Nasdaq’s market surveillance technology across its trading venues.
Nasdaq’s goal is to connect the governance model and market integrity of regulated equity markets with blockchain features such as 24-hour trading, programmable assets, and real-time transfer.
That shifts the focus of competition in tokenized stocks. The first stage was about giving investors the ability to trade U.S. stock prices around the clock. The next stage is whether regulated shares carrying shareholder rights can move between traditional markets and blockchains. If NETs launches on schedule in the second quarter of 2027, the Nasdaq-Kraken partnership could become an important test of whether tokenized securities remain an on-chain representation of traditional shares or develop into the settlement and trading rails of a next-generation global equity market.