Nasdaq Bets $100 Million on Kraken Parent Payward Before Its IPO

Payward, which runs the Kraken crypto exchange, received a $100 million investment from Nasdaq that pushes its valuation to $21 billion, Bloomberg revealed on Thursday.

The funds originate from Nasdaq's venture capital unit and deepen an existing collaboration that began in March. Neither enterprise has made the transaction public yet.

Nasdaq's Rationale for Investing in Payward

Nasdaq aims to have shares trade in tokenized form — digital blockchain records that can be exchanged outside standard trading sessions. Constructing such infrastructure from the ground up would require several years.

That system is already operational at Payward. By March, the firm's xStocks service — which issues tokenized versions of equities — had handled over $25 billion in trades, per Kraken. Through their alliance, Payward acts as the settlement agent for Nasdaq's equity token transactions and verifies the identities of token holders.

A Sept. 2 report from BeInCrypto revealed that Kraken had been secretly constructing a Wall Street crypto gateway in collaboration with Nasdaq, the London Stock Exchange, and Deutsche Börse, all while postponing its initial public offering. Nasdaq's new investment buys into that venture.

What the Nasdaq Investment Does Not Deliver

According to the Bloomberg report, the investment does not accelerate Payward's IPO timeline. The company submitted a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in November 2025, postponed it twice, and now expects to go public no sooner than the second quarter of 2027.

Additional funding reduces the urgency to go public. The $21 billion valuation represents a slight increase from the $20 billion figure from November 2025, when Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital, and Citadel Securities provided backing.

This fact carries greater significance than the investment amount. Payward's most recent quarterly results indicated that revenue rose 17% while earnings fell sharply. An investor whose own offerings rely on Payward's infrastructure — including tokenized London equities and U.S. equity tokens — has an influence that typical investors lack.

Nasdaq's investment is not a wager on yet another crypto exchange. Instead, it is purchasing a stake in the provider on which it intends to rely.