Exchange technology group Nasdaq has announced a $100 million strategic investment in Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, to expand their collaborative work on tokenised market infrastructure. Facilitated through its investment arm, Nasdaq Ventures, the transaction includes a capital infusion, a market surveillance agreement and continued joint development of the proposed Nasdaq Equity Token (NET) framework.
Founded in 2011 in San Francisco but now headquartered in Cheyenne, WY, Payward is a global financial infrastructure developer built to pioneer highly secure digital asset environments. It operates a single shared architecture, including a unified liquidity pool, compliance licensing, and a risk/settlement engine that powers a broad collection of multi-asset trading applications, including Kraken, the xStocks tokenised securities ecosystem and an infrastructure business for digital asset operations. Nasdaq’s investment valued the company at $21 billion.The collaboration, which is being led by Nasdaq’s recently-formed Digital Liquidity Networks (DLN) division that builds always-on market infrastructure, will continue to advance the technology supporting the NET architecture, which is expected to launch in the second quarter of 2027.
NETs are issuer-sponsored and hosted on a DLT record that integrates into the issuer’s official share registry. A token transfer moves the underlying security itself, carrying full legal equivalence with an ordinary share.
The NET foundation describes how tokenised equities can move across different market environments while preserving the rights and protections intended for issuers and investors. The next phase of the collaboration will focus on the global distribution, trading and post-trade capabilities needed to support the broader adoption of tokenised equities.
“The next era of market evolution will be defined by how efficiently and seamlessly capital and assets move across the financial system with durable liquidity,” says Tal Cohen, President, Nasdaq. “Expanding our relationship with Payward reflects our conviction that the company can play an important role in building the infrastructure that supports this evolution.”
For its part, Payward’s xStocks digital asset infrastructure offers tokenised exposure to publicly traded US equities and ETFs, hosted on multiple public blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana and OKX’s X Layer. A key element of the Nasdaq/Payward work will evolve xStocks so they confer shareholder privileges like voting rights and cash distribution entitlements.
Payward’s role within the NET architecture is to run KYC and AML checks and settle NET transactions in eligible jurisdictions through xStocks. That currently excludes the US and the UK.
Another facet of the expanded partnership is the integration of Nasdaq’s market surveillance technology across Payward’s trading operations to enhance regulatory compliance and market integrity across multiple asset classes.
For Payward, the announcement of its expanded Nasdaq partnership follows a recent investment/tokenisaton announcement with Deutsche Borse and an agreement to work with the London Stock Exchange to tokenise publicly-listed equities in the UK.
Subscribe to our newsletter
