Wall Street’s biggest exchanges are racing to put the $126 trillion global equity market on blockchains — and they’re doing it hand‑in‑hand with crypto exchanges.
Two major moves last week underscore that shift. Nasdaq is building a framework that would let publicly listed companies issue blockchain-native versions of their shares while preserving traditional ownership rights and governance. To distribute those tokenized stocks globally, Nasdaq is partnering with Payward — the parent company of Kraken — and hopes to launch as early as the first half of 2027.
Days earlier, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a strategic investment in crypto exchange OKX at a $25 billion valuation. The deal includes plans to roll out tokenized stocks and crypto futures, tapping into OKX’s roughly 120 million users.
Why this matters
- These steps aren’t isolated experiments — they signal a broader rethinking of how markets could operate. Instead of separate systems with fixed trading hours, tokenized assets on blockchains promise a unified, always‑on marketplace where price discovery, settlement and new financial services can happen around the clock.
- A January SEC Staff Statement on Tokenized Securities helped accelerate this transition by clarifying that tokenized equities can carry the same legal status as their paper counterparts, giving incumbents regulatory cover to enter the space.
Industry perspective
Antoine Scalia, founder and CEO of crypto accounting and compliance firm Cryptio, frames the trend as a move toward an “everything exchange,” where all asset classes trade on the same rails. He highlights a new dynamic: traditional exchanges want access to crypto-native traders, while crypto venues need the distribution, credibility and infrastructure that legacy players bring. “Distribution works both ways,” Scalia says — producing both friction and complementarity between the two sides.
The market opportunity
- Tokenized equities today remain small — roughly $1 billion — but growth is rapid. Data from RWA.xyz shows the tokenized stocks market has tripled since mid‑2025 as players like Kraken, Ondo Finance and Robinhood introduced token versions.
- A joint Boston Consulting Group and Ripple report projects tokenized assets could grow at about 53% annually, reaching $18.9 trillion across all asset classes by 2033 in its base case.
What tokenization could unlock
- Continuous price discovery: Tokenized shares trade 24/7, potentially unlocking more capital, improving liquidity and dampening volatility compared with traditional fixed‑hours markets.
- DeFi integration and capital efficiency: Tokenized equities can be used as collateral in decentralized finance, enabling more efficient lending, borrowing and new financing pathways.
- Bridging liquidity pools: One of the biggest current pain points is that on‑chain markets and traditional markets are largely separate, hurting liquidity for tokenized stocks. If Nasdaq, ICE and others can connect those pools, liquidity constraints could ease substantially — a scenario Tenbin Labs founder Yuki Yuminaga says “could change the equation.”
What’s next
The big questions aren’t just technical but competitive: will traditional exchanges dominate tokenized securities, or will crypto-native platforms like Coinbase and Kraken seize the lead? The answer will likely be hybrid — partnerships, investments and increasingly entangled relationships suggest a future where legacy and crypto players coexist as collaborators and competitors.
Either way, the push by Nasdaq and ICE — leveraging crypto exchanges’ distribution and user bases — marks a decisive step toward mainstreaming tokenized equities and reshaping the plumbing of global capital markets.
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