Kraken Parent Payward to Tokenize 100 Largest London-Listed Stocks as xStocks

100 London-Listed Giants Head Onchain

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, announced on September 1 that it will tokenize the 100 largest companies on the London Stock Exchange, issuing them as xStocks over the coming weeks. The move sits inside a wider partnership between Payward and the LSE aimed at bringing the UK equity market onchain. Each xStock is backed one-to-one by the underlying listed share and tracks its price — cash exposure without the contract mechanics of instruments like crypto options — yet the token is not the share itself: holders receive no voting rights or other shareholder entitlements, and the legal issuer is Backed Assets (JE) Limited, a Jersey-registered entity. The tokenomics are deliberately straightforward — one token, one unit of tracked exposure — and the transfer rails are the headline: xStocks can move between centralized exchanges, self-custody wallets and onchain applications, trading around the clock wherever a supporting secondary market exists. That always-on settlement profile mirrors the model stablecoin infrastructure such as Tether's Stable chain applies to USDT transfers. Payward will distribute the new UK-market xStocks to eligible investors in more than 110 countries, though UK-based investors are excluded from the product for now. The first LSE-listed names are expected to appear shortly on Kraken and on platforms within the xStocks Alliance. Payward's official announcement confirms the 100 largest London-listed equities will go live as xStocks with programmable, onchain access for investors across multiple regions. The framework is not new: xStocks launched in June 2025 and, per Payward, has since processed more than $40 billion in cumulative trading volume, with roughly $20 billion of that settled onchain across a holder base exceeding 200,000. For a market that still closes overnight and on weekends, wrapping the UK's blue-chip heavyweights in always-tradeable tokens is a structural shift in how that exposure can be reached — and this time the incumbent exchange itself is attached.

official announcementhttps://x.com/Payward/status/2094688507155341617?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

LSE 24 and the 2027 Listing Plan

The exchange side of the deal gives the partnership its regulatory spine. The LSE said it plans, subject to approval from regulators, to list xStocks on its new LSE 24 market in 2027, with customer testing of the venue beginning before the end of this year. LSE 24 is a separate out-of-hours market: it runs from 17:00 to 07:50, pausing for 30 minutes between 18:30 and 19:00, while the existing main market covers 08:00 to 16:30. Combined, the two venues create a nearly continuous trading day from Monday through Friday, with ETP trading slated to begin in the first half of 2027, again pending regulatory sign-off. The assets supported on LSE 24 are expected to include tokenized equities representing listed companies across the United States, the EU, the UK and Hong Kong, giving the LSE's member firms access to multi-region tokenized assets from within a regulated market environment. Beyond today's wrapper-style xStocks, Payward and the LSE are also exploring equity tokens that would be issued and managed natively onchain while carrying the same rights as traditional shares and remaining fully fungible with them — a materially different design, since current xStocks provide economic exposure only. Settlement and asset servicing for such structures could run through LSEG's Digital Securities Depository, a regulated market infrastructure built for issuing, recording, transferring and settling tokenized securities. The companies also plan to study connecting digital-native market access, wallet-based operations and partner infrastructure to LSEG's regulated market ecosystem. Notably, Payward is not betting on London alone: in March it announced a similar tokenized-equity partnership with Nasdaq, developing infrastructure to move issuer-led equity tokens between regulated markets and distributed blockchain networks — rails that, whether secured through proof of work or other consensus mechanisms, must still satisfy exchange-grade compliance. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

From Wrappers to Regulated Rails

Read together, the two announcements mark the point where tokenized equities graduate from crypto-native wrappers to exchange-operated infrastructure. The load-bearing document here is the exchange's own announcement: the LSE is committing its regulated market ecosystem, its Digital Securities Depository settlement layer and a dedicated 24-hour venue to the effort, with every step explicitly conditioned on regulatory approval. COINOTAG's view is that the sequencing matters — economic exposure first, full-rights equity tokens later — because it lets regulators test settlement and custody before shareholder rights move onchain. For investors comparing venues for tokenized exposure, our guide to the best crypto exchanges covers where xStocks-style products already trade. The 2027 LSE 24 listing is the milestone to watch.