Nasdaq Invests $100 Million in Kraken Parent Payward

Nasdaq’s venture arm agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken, extending a tokenized-equities partnership the two firms struck in March and adding a market surveillance agreement that installs Nasdaq technology inside Payward’s trading venues, Nasdaq said on Thursday.

The investment values Payward at $21 billion, according to Bloomberg, which reported the figure ahead of the announcement citing people familiar with the matter. Nasdaq’s release does not disclose a valuation, the size of the stake, whether the $100 million buys newly issued or existing shares, or any governance rights.

Nasdaq now owns equity in the venue it has picked to distribute its own tokenized shares outside the United States, and the deal lands nine days after Payward struck a comparable arrangement with the London Stock Exchange. Payward is assembling the same position with three exchange groups at once — Nasdaq, LSEG and Deutsche Börse, which bought into the company in April — while each of them builds a competing route to tokenized equities.

A Valuation Round Trip

The $21 billion mark is a recovery. Payward raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation in November 2025 from backers including Citadel Securities, Jane Street and DRW Venture Capital. Five months later, Deutsche Börse’s $200 million investment priced the company at roughly $13.3 billion for about 1.5% on a fully diluted basis, a 33% markdown. The Nasdaq round is 58% above that April price.

Payward reported adjusted revenue of $508 million for the second quarter, up 17% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA of $23 million. Platform transaction volume fell 18% to $310 billion. Funded accounts rose 42% to 6.6 million. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi confirmed in April that the company filed a confidential draft S-1 with the SEC in November 2025.

Nasdaq shares traded at $93.68 on Thursday morning, down 0.6% from Wednesday’s close, giving the exchange operator a market capitalization of about $52 billion. Wells Fargo was Nasdaq’s exclusive capital markets advisor on the transaction.

Rails That Do Not Close

Sethi built his case for the deal on clearing-house collateral. More than $2 trillion of stock trades run through the U.S. clearing system daily, he said, buys and sells net down by roughly 98%, and the clearing house holds $10 billion to $20 billion against the remainder while it waits to settle.

“Cutting that wait from two days to one in 2024 released $3 billion. Onchain settlement removes the wait,” Sethi said. “The next phase of the collaboration is planned to advance Nasdaq Equity Tokens onto rails that do not close, with shareholder rights intact.”

The $3 billion figure checks out. The T+1 After Action Report published by DTCC, SIFMA and ICI in September 2024 found the NSCC Clearing Fund fell by an average of $3 billion, or 23%, from $12.8 billion under T+2 to $9.8 billion after the May 2024 move to T+1.

Tal Cohen, president of Nasdaq, said the expanded relationship reflects “our conviction that the company can play an important role in building the infrastructure that supports this evolution.” Inside Nasdaq the work sits with Digital Liquidity Networks, the markets unit the company also used to justify its August acquisition of alternative trading system LeveL Markets.

What NETs Actually Are

Nasdaq Equity Tokens are issuer-sponsored, which separates the design from third-party wrappers. Under the framework Nasdaq published in March, the blockchain record integrates into the issuer’s official share registry and a token transfer moves the underlying security itself, carrying full legal equivalence with an ordinary share.

The regulatory permission is narrower than the ambition. The SEC approved Nasdaq’s rule change on March 18, as modified by a second amendment, and the approval covers trading in tokenized form during a pilot program operated by The Depository Trust Company, limited to Russell 1000 constituents and certain ETFs. Nasdaq must give members at least 30 calendar days’ notice before trading begins. The companies expect to launch NETs in the second quarter of 2027, the back end of the H1 2027 window Nasdaq gave in March.

Payward’s role, set out when Nasdaq tapped Kraken as its settlement layer in March, is to run KYC and AML checks and settle NET transactions in eligible jurisdictions through xStocks. That excludes the U.S. and the UK. xStocks is offered through licensed entities in Bermuda and Cyprus.

Third Place Onchain

xStocks passed $35 billion in cumulative transaction volume in its first year, with $12.5 billion settled onchain across seven networks and close to 200,000 holders, Payward said in July. Outstanding value is a different picture. Tokenized stocks held about $2.93 billion in distributed value as of Sept. 9, according to RWA.xyz, with xStocks third at $631 million behind Ondo at $859 million and Binance’s bStocks at $647 million. Payward said in July that xStocks accounted for eight of the 15 largest tokenized stocks by market capitalization, citing CoinGecko.

Competition for the tokenized listing venue is now direct. The London Stock Exchange said on Sept. 1 that, subject to regulatory approval, it intends to list xStocks and trade them on its LSE 24 venue in 2027 — the same year Nasdaq expects to launch NETs through the same distributor. NYSE is building its own 24/7 tokenized equity platform on private blockchains.

Surveillance On The Side

The second half of the announcement makes Payward a Nasdaq customer. Payward will adopt Nasdaq’s surveillance technology across crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures and options venues. Neither company disclosed what Payward will pay, or whether the surveillance contract was priced independently of the $100 million investment.

Nasdaq’s own forward-looking disclosure lists both halves of the deal as uncertain, naming the benefits to either company from tokenized-equities infrastructure and Payward’s adoption of the surveillance product as statements that are not guarantees of future performance.