Nasdaq Puts $100 Million Into Kraken's Parent Ahead of 2027 Tokens

Nasdaq is buying a piece of the company that owns Kraken. Nasdaq Ventures, the exchange operator's strategic investment arm, said on Thursday it would put $100 million into Payward Inc. and extend a partnership the two firms first announced in March. Payward will run Nasdaq's market surveillance technology across its venues. The pair also plan to launch Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs, in the second quarter of 2027, with Payward's xStocks business plugged into the framework. Wells Fargo advised Nasdaq on the transaction.

The number the release does not carry

Nasdaq's announcement names no valuation. Markets Media, reading the same release, said so plainly. The figure in circulation is $21 billion, which The Block attributed to Bloomberg's reporting on Thursday morning and CoinDesk carried in its headline the same day. Quartz printed it without saying where it came from. Nobody at either firm has confirmed it on the record. Payward was reported in May to be seeking fresh money at a $20 billion mark, and it had set a similar target during the $800 million round that accompanied its confidential filing in November 2025. The company pushed its listing to the second quarter of 2027 last week.

Nasdaq's own arithmetic

The release builds its case on settlement plumbing. More than $2 trillion in US stock trades pass through the clearing system every day, it says, and 98% of buys and sells cancel out before anything settles. The clearing house holds $10 billion to $20 billion in collateral against what is left. The 2024 move to T+1, meaning a trade settles one business day after it is struck instead of two, freed about $3 billion of that. Every one of those numbers is Nasdaq's. No independent tally appears in any account this week.

"Onchain settlement removes the wait. The next phase of the collaboration is planned to advance Nasdaq Equity Tokens onto rails that do not close, with shareholder rights intact," Payward co-chief executive Arjun Sethi said in the release.

Surveillance is the quieter half

The tokens will take until 2027. The surveillance work starts now, and it covers more ground than the token project does: crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures and options, all watched by the system a listed US exchange uses on itself. For Payward that is a compliance argument as much as a technical one. The company already lets traders post tokenized stocks as collateral, a business that draws supervisory attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Nasdaq's Digital Liquidity Networks unit, which the company describes as its always-on infrastructure arm, is leading the collaboration.

What a shareholder right means on a token

Both sides say holders keep their rights. Quartz went further and wrote that the tokens carry voting rights equivalent to owning the stock outright. The release says only that the design carries issuer protections, and Sethi's line says shareholder rights stay intact. None of the three explains the mechanism, and they do not reconcile on how far the claim reaches.

Other questions are simply open. Nasdaq has not said what stake $100 million buys, or whether the money is new capital or a purchase from existing holders. Neither firm has named the chains NETs will settle on, or the regulator that signs off on them. Nor has either said whether Thursday's investment moves the listing date again.