The world’s second-largest stock exchange is betting on crypto infrastructure, writing a nine-figure check to prove it.
Nasdaq announced a $100 million investment in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, deepening a partnership the two companies struck in March and setting a second-quarter 2027 target to bring tokenized Nasdaq-listed stocks to market.
The deal, made through Nasdaq Ventures, the exchange’s strategic investment arm, comes alongside a new market surveillance agreement under which Payward will deploy Nasdaq’s oversight technology across its crypto, equities, futures, options, and tokenized equity venues. Bloomberg, which first reported the investment, put Payward’s valuation at $21 billion. Nasdaq’s own announcement did not confirm that figure, nor did it disclose the size of the stake or any governance rights attached to the deal.
Stocks on a Blockchain With Voting Rights
The central product of the partnership is the Nasdaq Equity Token, or NET—a blockchain-based representation of a publicly listed share that, unlike most tokenized equity products on the market, comes with full voting rights intact.
The majority of tokenized stock offerings available today give holders price exposure only: if the underlying share rises, the token rises with it, but the holder has no say in company votes and none of the legal protections that come with actual share ownership. Nasdaq and Payward are designing NETs to preserve the rights that issuers built into the original shares.
The infrastructure to make that work is being built by Digital Liquidity Networks, Nasdaq’s markets division focused on always-on capital movement, in partnership with Payward’s existing xStocks platform, which had processed over $25 billion in tokenized equity trades by March.
Nasdaq President Tal Cohen said the investment reflects a conviction that Payward can help build the connective tissue for the next era of markets.
“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,” Cohen said. “This partnership advances our work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens and helps build a more connected financial system while preserving the trust, transparency and integrity that underpin capital formation.”
Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi argued the existing system leaves trillions of dollars sitting idle for no good reason.
“More than $2 trillion of stock trades run through the U.S. clearing system every day. Buys and sells net down by about 98 percent, and 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. Onchain settlement removes the wait.”
Everyone Wants a Piece of Kraken
Nasdaq is not alone in reaching for a crypto exchange stake. The deal is the latest in a rapid sequence of traditional finance firms buying into digital asset infrastructure.
Deutsche Börse paid $200 million for roughly 1.5% of Payward in April. Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, invested in OKX in March at a $25 billion valuation and took a board seat, agreeing to open NYSE tokenized equity markets to OKX’s 120 million users. The London Stock Exchange Group announced its own xStocks partnership with Payward last week, targeting the 100 largest UK-listed equities.
The $21 billion figure reported by Bloomberg would represent a significant recovery. Deutsche Börse’s April investment implied a valuation of roughly $13.3 billion—a 33% markdown from the $20 billion Payward fetched in its November 2025 funding round from Citadel Securities, Jane Street and DRW Venture Capital. If the Bloomberg figure is accurate, the Nasdaq round prices Payward approximately 58% above where it stood five months ago.
Those swings are hard to square with the underlying numbers. Payward reported adjusted revenue of $508 million for Q2 2026, up 17% year-over-year, but platform transaction volume fell 18% to $310 billion. In other words, Payward is making more money per trade even as fewer trades are happening. That is a reasonable business to be in, but it does not obviously explain a valuation that has ricocheted by hundreds of millions of dollars within a single year.