Nasdaq Bets $100M on Kraken Parent Payward at $21B Valuation as Bitcoin (BTC) Market Moves On-Chain

Nasdaq Puts $100M Into Payward

Nasdaq's venture arm has invested $100 million in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, in a deal that values the operator of one of the best crypto exchanges at $21 billion, according to Zombit, citing people familiar with the terms. Announced Thursday, the investment extends a partnership the two firms established in March and pairs capital with infrastructure: Kraken will offer tokenized products tracking Nasdaq-listed equities on its platform, while deploying Nasdaq's market-surveillance technology across its crypto, equities, tokenized stock, futures and options venues. For Nasdaq, the move accelerates a strategy it has been assembling all year. The exchange operator previously filed a proposal with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to create a trading mechanism for tokenized securities, and in August announced plans to acquire Level Markets as part of a push into round-the-clock financial markets. Kraken is expanding on the same front: earlier this month it unveiled a partnership with the London Stock Exchange to offer tokenized products tracking major UK equities from 2027, supported by 24-hour trading five days a week. Traditional exchanges are circling too — Deutsche Börse put $200 million into Payward in April, citing blockchain-based securities. The capital is flowing into a market that is small but compounding quickly: data from RWA.xyz shows the distributed value of tokenized stocks worldwide has surpassed $2.9 billion, a 7.4% increase over the past month. As the investable universe of on-chain equities widens — from US consumer names like Costco Wholesale to globally listed industrials such as Hyundai Motor — the infrastructure race for issuance and settlement rails is clearly on.

Alpha Ladder Brings xStocks to Asia

On the distribution side, Alpha Ladder Finance Pte. Ltd. announced on September 11 that its Web2.5 wealth-management platform, Alpha Ladder WealthX, has gone live with xStocks tokenized US equity products, opening access to institutional and accredited investors in selected Asia-Pacific markets. Per the company's own announcement, Alpha Ladder is among the first licensed wealth managers in Asia to offer the products, which run on a three-way cooperation with Singapore payments firm MetaComp and Payward — the same Kraken parent that developed the xStocks framework. Each xStock token is fully backed 1:1 by the corresponding listed share, giving holders economic exposure to the underlying US stock with extended trading hours and settlement recorded directly on a blockchain. Company disclosures put xStocks coverage at more than 700 listed tickers, cumulative trading volume above $40 billion and over 200,000 unique holders worldwide. The compliance scaffolding matters as much as the product itself: Alpha Ladder has held a Capital Markets Services licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore since 2021, while MetaComp operates under a Major Payment Institution licence. The rollout carries plainly disclosed limits as well — xStocks, issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, are not registered under the US Securities Act, are unavailable to US persons, and confer no ownership or voting rights in the underlying shares. The institutional demand behind such launches is quantifiable: figures cited in the release put on-chain real-world assets at roughly $19.3 billion as of end-March 2026, up from $5.4 billion in January 2025, with a joint EY-CoinBase survey finding 63% of institutional investors strongly interested in tokenized assets. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

A $2 Trillion Tokenization Race

Read together, the two announcements trace a single arc: tokenized equities are following Bitcoin (BTC) and other crypto assets out of the experimental phase and into regulated, exchange-backed infrastructure. What the official disclosures state is concrete — a $100 million Nasdaq cheque, a $21 billion Payward valuation, and a McKinsey projection cited in Alpha Ladder's release that tokenized assets outside crypto and stablecoins could reach $2 trillion by 2030. Our read: control of issuance and surveillance rails, not retail demand, is now the competitive frontier, and legacy exchanges are paying up early to secure it.