Nasdaq is pushing tokenized securities closer to the mainstream market. The company's venture capital division has invested $100 million in the parent company of the crypto exchange Kraken, Payward. Both parties plan to launch tokenized stock trading in the second quarter of 2027, and at the same time, they will build the necessary market infrastructure and monitoring systems.

Cooperation extends to transaction infrastructure

This collaboration is a continuation of the previous tests between both parties on Nasdaq Equity Tokens ( NETs ). According to NASDAQ, the new phase will focus on the distribution and trading of tokenized stocks, with the goal of placing digital representations of assets such as publicly traded securities on blockchain networks for circulation.

The article mentions that so-called "tokenized stocks" are not equivalent to directly holding the corresponding stocks themselves, but rather represent those assets digitally on the blockchain. This is also one of the issues that has been discussed quite a lot on Wall Street recently, namely the positioning of such products in terms of rights ownership and market structure.

Kraken Expanding the Layout of the Multi-Asset Platform

In addition to tokenized stock partnerships, Payward will also introduce NASDAQ's market monitoring technology into its multiple trading venues, covering both crypto assets and future tokenized stock services. For Kraken, this means that its platform layout is expanding from crypto trading to traditional financial products such as stocks and derivatives.

Kraken has been attempting in recent years to expand its positioning from a single cryptocurrency exchange to a multi-asset trading platform. The introduction of NASDAQ's monitoring technology this time also indicates its desire to align with traditional trading market standards in terms of compliance monitoring and market infrastructure.

Wall Street accelerates its deployment of tokenized securities

This investment also reflects Wall Street's accelerating efforts to incorporate tokenized securities into the mainstream market system. Nasdaq is betting that in the future, assets such as stocks can exist both in a blockchain-based form and outside of traditional financial infrastructure, while still being connected to existing markets.

If this system is ultimately implemented, potential changes include improved transaction and settlement efficiency, as well as a further extension of market operating hours. According to a report citing Bloomberg, after this investment, the valuation of Payward reached $21 billion.

From an industry perspective, Nasdaq's investment this time is not only a financial investment but also an effort to lay the infrastructure in advance for the issuance, circulation, and monitoring of tokenized stocks. For crypto platforms, such cooperation helps them enter the broader field of traditional asset trading; for traditional exchanges, it prepares an entry point for the blockchain-based securities market.