Most tokenized equity products hand holders price exposure and nothing else. Nasdaq’s design puts issuers at the center instead, and it has been building a gateway with Kraken to move tokenized equities between regulated and on-chain venues. Kraken already offers them through Payward Services, its business-to-business arm.
Exchanges are buying in
Nasdaq is the latest established operator to take a crypto exchange stake this year. Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, invested in OKX in March at a $25 billion valuation, taking a board seat and agreeing to open NYSE tokenized equities markets to OKX’s 120 million accounts. Deutsche Börse paid $200 million for 1.5% of Payward the following month.
Nasdaq plans its own token in the second quarter of next year, according to Bloomberg‘s sources.
Payward’s valuation has been unsettled through all of it. It raised $800 million at $20 billion last November and used that figure again in April when agreeing to buy derivatives exchange Bitnomial. Deutsche Börse’s stake, bought the same month, implied about $13.3 billion by Bloomberg‘s calculation.
Its route to the public markets has been slower. Payward filed a confidential S-1 in November, then shelved the listing in March, the same month Kraken became the first crypto firm granted access to the Federal Reserve’s core payments system.
