Nasdaq Ventures has put $100 million into Payward, the operator behind the cryptocurrency trading platform Kraken, as revealed by the prominent American electronic equities marketplace on Thursday. Insiders previously disclosed to Bloomberg that this capital injection sets Payward’s valuation at $21 billion.
Payward’s capital-raising ambitions were initially broken by CoinDesk in May, at which point a pair of insiders shared that Payward was hunting for fresh financing anchored by a $20 billion valuation.
The exchange noted that it regards Kraken as a strategic vehicle to aid in the creation of tokenized market systems.
Under the terms of this financial pact, Kraken will roll out Nasdaq’s tokenized equities directly onto its interface. The objective is to grant participants the ability to acquire and hold tokenized versions of Nasdaq-quoted shares, while retaining identical voting privileges as standard stocks circulating on Nasdaq’s order books.
Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi stated that the upcoming stage of the partnership aims to bring Nasdaq Equity Tokens onto non-stop operational rails while preserving complete shareholder privileges.
Back in March, Nasdaq unveiled its strategy to grant public firms enhanced governance over their equities in a digital token format. It began collaborating with Kraken on the underlying architecture designed to connect tokenized shares across both compliant and decentralized blockchain environments.
This transaction forms a key piece of a wider industry movement where American market operators increasingly adopt distributed ledger technology. Meanwhile, the NYSE is actively developing its own platform to support round-the-clock trading for tokenized equities and exchange-traded funds.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/10/nasdaq-invests-usd100-million-in-kraken-parent-company-payward-at-usd21-billion-valuation.
