Kraken Pushes xStocks to Turn Tokenized Stocks into Equivalent Rails

Kraken is trying to transform tokenized stocks from a sideshow to a parallel stock market, operating through the xStocks platform and a new Nasdaq partnership working on cryptographic rails.

Kraken seeks to transform tokenized stocks from a sideshow to a parallel securities market that runs on cryptographic rails 24/7. Its xStocks platform now offers more than 60 tokenized US stocks and ETFs, is distributed to eligible clients across the European Union, and has processed more than $25 billion in total transaction volume in less than eight months, according to company data and recent coverage.

How Kraken’s tokenized equity platform works

xStocks allows users to buy, sell, and transfer blockchain-based tokens that mirror real US stocks like Tesla, Amazon, Nvidia, and broader ETFs, and each token is fully 1:1 backed by the underlying security held by a licensed custodian in a remote bankruptcy facility. Cointelegraph and Finance Magnates report that the product gives investors 24/5 trading of digital certificates that track US prices, longer hours than the 9-to-5 of Wall Street, and the ability to transfer positions between the respective venues or keep them on-chain. Kraken’s European offering, announced in September 2025, is clearly aimed at customers who find exposure to US markets “unnecessarily difficult for a very long time,” as global consumer chief Mark Greenberg put it.

Under the hood, Kraken makes tokenization closer to its original stack. The exchange has agreed to acquire Backed Finance, the issuer behind xStocks, which combines issuance and trading under one roof, just as it plans to IPO in 2026. AInvest and other outlets note that xStocks already exceeds $25 billion in total transaction volume, including centralized trading, DeFi liquidity and money/visit flows, with partnerships to distribute tokens through platforms such as Bybit and Gate.io to users in more than 110 countries. At the same time, a separate initiative sees Nasdaq using the tokenization technology of Payward (Kraken’s parent) xStocks to transfer listed securities to blockchain rails for global distribution – this is a sign that operators prefer to build more and more on top of Kraken’s infrastructure, rather than compete with it from scratch.

Market Structure: Stock Rails in Crypto Infrastructure

Pitch is dull: combine stocks as stablecoins. AInvest summarizes Kraken’s goal as “strengthening stocks like stablecoins in web3 ecosystems,” allowing traders to place tokenized stocks as collateral, wrap them in chain strategies, or trade perpetual futures that refer to traditional listings. A recent edition of Business Wire notes that Kraken has already listed “the world’s first perpetual regulated equity futures,” which uses xStocks as a reference layer so traders “can respond to market events without waiting for traditional markets to open.” This transforms the tokenized shares from their respective packaging into a new layer of potential: an equity exposure that trades like crypto, removed from borders and not just a single ledger of a national exchange regulated by a mixture of securities law and smart contracts.

The setting remains as a hard edge. The World Exchange Federation has warned that some tokenized stock products act as “shams” that may not provide full shareholder rights, and Nasdaq’s 2025 proposal to list securities alongside common stocks was a direct response to that risk. Kraken believes that by fully retaining xStocks, consolidating the issuer and pushing regulated derivatives above, it can stay on the right side of that line – and in the process turn its tokenized equity platform into a meaningful income and strategic pillar ahead of its planned public listing.