Nasdaq Ventures to Invest $100 Million in Kraken Parent Payward

Nasdaq announced on September 10, 2026 an expansion of its relationship with Payward, the parent company of crypto platform Kraken, including an agreement by Nasdaq Ventures to invest $100 million in Payward. The company’s announcement also covers continued advancement of the companies’ joint work on the Nasdaq Equity Token (NET) framework and a new market surveillance agreement spanning Payward’s trading venues.

Nasdaq Ventures is Nasdaq’s strategic investment arm, through which the company invests in technologies and market infrastructure that support the long-term evolution of global capital markets. Nasdaq said the investment in Payward reflects the strategic nature of the work the two organizations are advancing together. Wells Fargo served as Nasdaq’s exclusive capital markets advisor on the transaction.

Under the tokenization workstream, Nasdaq and Payward will continue to advance the operational and commercial infrastructure supporting Nasdaq Equity Tokens, with an expectation to launch NETs in the second quarter of 2027. Within Nasdaq, the collaboration is being led by Digital Liquidity Networks (DLN), the company’s markets business focused on building the always-on market infrastructure needed to help capital, assets and liquidity move more efficiently across the world. The next phase of the collaboration will advance the global distribution, trading and post-trade capabilities needed to support the broader adoption of tokenized equities. Nasdaq describes the effort as an issuer-centric approach grounded in strong governance, regulatory compliance and market integrity.

“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,” said Tal Cohen, President of Nasdaq. Cohen said the expanded relationship reflects Nasdaq’s conviction that Payward can play an important role in building the infrastructure supporting that evolution, and that the partnership advances the company’s work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens.

Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward, pointed to the mechanics of the existing U.S. clearing system. He stated that more than $2 trillion of stock trades run through the U.S. clearing system every day, that buys and sells net down by about 98 percent, and that the clearing house holds $10 billion to $20 billion of collateral against what is left while it waits a day to settle. “Cutting that wait from two days to one in 2024 released $3 billion,” Sethi said, adding that onchain settlement removes the wait. He said the next phase of the collaboration is planned to advance Nasdaq Equity Tokens onto rails that do not close, with shareholder rights intact.

As part of the expanded relationship, Payward will adopt Nasdaq’s market surveillance technology across its portfolio of trading venues, including crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures and options. The announcement states the adoption expands the collaboration to include capabilities that support market integrity and investor confidence.

Payward is a unified financial infrastructure platform that provides the infrastructure layer behind Kraken alongside a set of purpose-built products including NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks and CF Benchmarks, built on a single shared architecture covering liquidity, risk and margin, collateral and settlement, and compliance, according to the company’s published boilerplate.

Token Design and Filing History

The investment extends a partnership the companies first detailed on March 9, 2026, when Nasdaq announced its intention to launch an equity token design that puts public companies at the center of ownership rights, governance, transparency and the investor experience. Under that design, blockchain records will be integrated directly into the issuer’s official share registry, providing a regulated bridge between on-chain records and off-chain identity, and a transfer of the token will represent a transfer of the underlying security itself, preserving full legal and regulatory equivalence. Nasdaq said the design aims to use tokenization to modernize processes such as corporate actions, proxy voting and shareholder engagement.

The initiative builds on a tokenization proposal Nasdaq filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in September 2025, in which it proposed enabling equity securities to trade on its markets and to settle in token form through the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). Nasdaq has stated the initiative is consistent with the SEC’s 2026 Staff Statement on Tokenized Securities, which classifies tokenized equities the same under federal law as regular equity securities.

Payward’s own March 9, 2026 announcement said the companies would develop an Equities Transformation Gateway powered by the xStocks framework, designed to let clients in eligible jurisdictions move tokenized equities between a regulated, permissioned market environment and the permissionless decentralized finance ecosystem. Under that design, Payward Services will provide KYC and AML onboarding for holders of Nasdaq Equity Tokens, and Payward will serve as the primary and foundational settlement layer for NET transactions for an initial period in eligible jurisdictions where clients can trade xStocks. Payward reported at the time that xStocks had surpassed $25 billion in total transaction volume, including more than $4 billion settled on-chain, with over 85,000 unique holders across supported networks.

Payward’s March release stated that Nasdaq expected the Nasdaq Equity Tokens and related distributed ledger technology services to become operational beginning in the first quarter of 2027, while Nasdaq’s own March release pointed to the first half of 2027. The September 10, 2026 announcement states an expectation to launch NETs in the second quarter of 2027.