Nasdaq invests $100 million in Kraken parent company Payward

Nasdaq Ventures invests $100 million in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken. The investment values Payward at $21 billion and builds on a partnership announced earlier this year. The aim is to enable share trading via the blockchain, with tokenised Nasdaq shares that carry the same voting rights as ordinary shares.

In brief:

• Nasdaq Ventures invests $100 million in Payward at a valuation of $21 billion
• In the second quarter of 2027, tokenised Nasdaq shares will be launched, with the same voting rights as ordinary shares
• Payward has already processed $25 billion in volume through its xStocks platform, of which $4 billion was settled on-chain

Tokenised shares with voting rights

The investment expands a partnership that was concluded in March of this year. The joint goal is the launch of so-called Nasdaq Equity Tokens in the second quarter of 2027. These are issuer-sponsored, tokenised versions of Nasdaq shares that grant the same voting rights as ordinary shares.

Payward acts as the settlement layer and rolls out Nasdaq’s oversight system across its own trading platforms for crypto, shares, tokenised shares, futures and options. This news was also briefly reported earlier by Blockchain Stories.

Faster settlement as an argument

There is a clear rationale behind the investment. More than $2 trillion in US shares is still traded daily. After netting buy and sell orders, around 2% remains as the volume actually to be settled, which means that clearing houses hold $10 to $20 billion in collateral every night.

The move from two-day to one-day settlement in 2024 already produced savings of $3 billion. Settlement via the blockchain makes that waiting time unnecessary in principle. Tokenised shares therefore fit into a broader movement in which traditional financial infrastructure is brought on-chain, something that is also visible at Robinhood Chain.

Deutsche Börse preceded Nasdaq

Nasdaq is not the first major exchange organisation to invest in Payward. In April of this year, Deutsche Börse already came on board with an investment of $200 million. Since then, Payward’s xStocks platform has processed a total of $25 billion in trading volume, of which more than $4 billion was settled on-chain by around 85,000 users.

The combination of two major exchange investments in a short period shows that established market parties are actively investing in the infrastructure for on-chain share trading.