Kraken's Payward Tokenizes 100 Largest London Stocks as Bitcoin (BTC) Rails Expand

100 London Blue Chips Going On-Chain

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, signed an agreement with the London Stock Exchange Group on September 1 to tokenize the 100 largest London-listed companies. Under the deal, the UK's biggest blue-chip equities become xStocks — tokens backed one for one by the underlying real shares — giving investors 24/7, programmable onchain access in place of a fixed trading window. The companies say the 100 tokens will go live in the coming weeks, and the program will reach investors in more than 110 countries, though UK residents and US persons are expressly excluded from the rollout.

Payward's official announcement of the London Stock Exchange tokenization partnership

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

The mechanics show how far regulated finance has moved toward blockchain settlement. The London Stock Exchange plans to trade the tokenized shares on LSE 24, its round-the-clock venue, the moment regulators approve — a telling signal that a centuries-old exchange group treats onchain rails as an extension of its market rather than a rival. Programmable access of this kind rests on the same smart-contract plumbing that projects like Biconomy (BICO) specialize in, while general-purpose networks such as Polkadot (DOT) and the Internet Computer (ICP) compete to host similar real-world-asset flows. Arc Blockchain, Circle's stablecoin-native layer-1, targets the same institutional settlement niche.

Scale is already measurable in Payward's own disclosure. The company reports $40 billion in cumulative xStocks volume since June 2025 and more than 200,000 holders of the tokenized assets. Kraken is thus becoming the distribution rail for equities moving onto public blockchains — a position that places a crypto-native firm at the center of both Wall Street's and the City of London's tokenization experiments, with Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader crypto market serving as the settlement backbone these venues increasingly draw on.

Payward's Q2 2027 IPO Timeline

While it builds rails for other people's markets, Payward is holding off on listing itself. The company filed a confidential draft registration in November 2025, paused the IPO process in March 2026, and now points, per people familiar with the plans, toward the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest. The delay has not slowed a string of deals with incumbent exchanges. Nasdaq signed a similar agreement in March and is building a digital gateway with Payward so tokenized shares can cross between regulated venues and public blockchains, targeting a first-half 2027 launch. Deutsche Börse went further in April, paying $200 million for a stake of roughly 1.5% in Kraken — a price that implies a valuation near $13.3 billion, roughly a third below the $20 billion at which Payward raised $800 million last November in a round led by Jane Street and Citadel Securities. Wall Street bought the infrastructure, then marked it down.

The trading business explains the caution. Second-quarter adjusted revenue rose 17% to $508 million, but adjusted EBITDA fell 71% year over year to just $23 million, while platform volume dropped 18% to $310 billion. Payward kept acquiring through crypto's stalled IPO year anyway, closing its purchase of derivatives venue Bitnomial in May and completing a US-regulated derivatives stack it can now rent out — one that could even open Hyperliquid exposure to US traders. “The industry around us is consolidating. We built this company so that is when we compound fastest,” Co-CEO Arjun Sethi wrote in the quarterly letter, a document that never mentions the listing. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Rails Before Listing

The two threads — tokenizing the FTSE's largest names while shelving Payward's own IPO — trace one arc: crypto infrastructure firms now monetize incumbent finance's adoption of onchain rails rather than chasing retail fees or public-market proceeds. In our reading of the primary documents, the official disclosures state the sequencing plainly — infrastructure for other people's markets comes first. Whether public investors will eventually pay for that infrastructure, instead of Best Crypto Exchanges trading spreads, is the open question COINOTAG will track into 2027.