Nasdaq is making a $100 million bet on Kraken, and the bigger story may be what the exchange operator wants to build around it.
The Nasdaq investment in Kraken parent company Payward values the business at $21 billion, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the deal. The money is coming from Nasdaq’s venture arm and expands a partnership announced in March.
At the center of that partnership are tokenized stocks. Kraken will distribute Nasdaq’s tokenized equities on its platform, allowing customers to hold blockchain-based versions of Nasdaq-listed shares with the same voting rights as the underlying stock.
That detail matters. Many tokenized equity products are essentially digital wrappers around price exposure. Nasdaq is taking a different route, keeping the issuer at the center while working with Kraken on infrastructure that could move tokenized shares between regulated markets and on-chain venues.
Kraken already offers the products through Payward Services, its business-to-business unit.
What the Nasdaq Investment in Kraken Says About Wall Street’s Next Move
Nasdaq is hardly alone in getting closer to crypto exchanges.
In March, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested in OKX at a $25 billion valuation. The deal included a board seat and an agreement to develop NYSE tokenized equity markets for OKX’s 120 million accounts.
A month later, Deutsche Börse invested $200 million for a 1.5% stake in Payward, implying a valuation of roughly $13.3 billion based on Bloomberg’s calculation.
Now the Nasdaq investment in Kraken puts Payward back in the spotlight, with the latest deal assigning the company a considerably higher value.
Nasdaq is also reportedly preparing a token of its own for the second quarter of next year, adding another layer to its push toward blockchain-based market infrastructure.
The valuation story around Payward has been unusually fluid. The company raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation last November, a figure it also referenced in April when it agreed to acquire derivatives exchange Bitnomial.
Then came Deutsche Börse’s investment at a valuation of about $13.3 billion. Five months later, Nasdaq is putting the number at $21 billion.
The company’s journey toward public markets has also taken a detour. Payward confidentially filed an S-1 registration statement in November, then shelved plans for a listing in March.
That same month, Kraken became the first crypto company to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s core payments system.
Taken together, the moves show how quickly the boundaries between crypto exchanges, traditional market operators and tokenized securities are being redrawn.
Rest assured, this content is strictly educational and does not constitute financial advice.