Nasdaq and Payward — the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken — announced a sweeping partnership on March 9, 2026, to build the Equities Transformation Gateway, infrastructure designed to bring traditional stock markets onto the blockchain.

The gateway is built on Kraken's xStocks technology, which represents real publicly traded company shares as blockchain tokens. Each xStocks token carries the same legal rights as the underlying share, including voting rights and dividends. The gateway will bridge two market types: permissioned (regulated, identity-verified) exchanges and permissionless (public blockchain) networks — letting tokenized shares move fluidly between both.

What Changes

The most immediate shift is settlement speed. Traditional equities currently settle in one business day (T+1), meaning cash and shares are exchanged the day after a trade. Tokenized stocks enable T+0 atomic settlement — the trade and the transfer happen simultaneously, freeing up capital currently tied up waiting for clearance.

The partnership also means stocks could trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week, removing the constraints of traditional market hours. Nasdaq brings institutional liquidity and regulatory credibility; Kraken brings the on-chain infrastructure it has been developing since xStocks launched in mid-2025.

Timeline

The platform is not live yet. Nasdaq and Kraken are targeting a launch in the first half of 2027, pending SEC approval and regulatory review. Nasdaq has been pitching early-access partnerships with Salesforce, Cisco, Google, Adobe, and CrowdStrike, according to sources cited by Wired.

Kraken bolstered its tokenization capabilities in December 2025 when it acquired Backed Finance, a firm focused on real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. The Nasdaq deal extends that infrastructure to one of the world's largest stock exchanges.