Nasdaq is investing $100 million in Payward, the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, in a deal that values Payward at $21 billion, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding comes from Nasdaq’s venture arm and extends a strategic partnership first announced in March. Under the arrangement, Kraken will distribute Nasdaq’s tokenized stocks on its platform, giving customers access to Nasdaq-listed equities in token form with the same voting rights as ordinary shares traded on the exchange.
Unlike most tokenized equity products, which typically offer only price exposure, Nasdaq’s structure gives issuers a central role. The companies have been building a gateway through Kraken to move tokenized equities between regulated and on-chain venues. Kraken already offers these products through Payward Services, its business-to-business arm.
The deal is the third time this year that an established exchange operator has taken a stake in a crypto exchange. Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, invested in OKX in March at a $25 billion valuation, secured a board seat and agreed to open NYSE tokenized equities markets to OKX’s 120 million accounts. Deutsche Börse then paid $200 million for a 1.5% stake in Payward the following month.
Bloomberg’s sources also said Nasdaq plans to launch its own token in the second quarter of next year. Payward’s valuation has been uneven: it raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation last November, used the same figure in April when agreeing to buy derivatives exchange Bitnomial, and Deutsche Börse’s investment implied a valuation of about $13.3 billion.
Kraken’s public-market path has been delayed. 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.
