London Stock Exchange Joins Kraken’s Parent to Put Its Top 100 Stocks Onchain

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, and the London Stock Exchange said Monday that they will work together to tokenize UK equities, beginning with the 100 largest London-listed companies. Payward announced that the tokens, which it calls xStocks, will go live in the coming weeks on Kraken and other platforms in the xStocks alliance.

xStocks are backed one for one by a listed share, Payward said. Holders can keep them on a centralized exchange, in a self-custodied wallet or inside an onchain application, and can trade them at any hour, the company added. Payward said the framework has cleared $40 billion in total volume in a little over a year, close to $20 billion of it settled onchain, across more than 200,000 holders.

Investors in over 110 countries will be able to buy the London names. Investors based in the UK will not, because xStocks are not currently available to them.

The London Stock Exchange’s own part of the arrangement is both further out and conditional. Subject to regulatory approval, the exchange said it would list xStocks and support trading in them on LSE 24, the 24/5 venue it unveiled in July. LSE 24 is scheduled to open for client testing by the end of 2026 and to start with exchange traded products in the first half of 2027, with equities following after that. It will run from 17:00 to 07:50 Monday through Friday, pausing half an hour for end-of-day processing.

The two firms also said they would explore equity tokens issued natively through the exchange, carrying the same rights as ordinary shares and fully fungible with them.

“Tokenization has the potential to change how investors access, and how issuers use, financial markets, but it must develop in a way that preserves the trust, rights and role of regulated markets,” Julia Hoggett, CEO of LSE plc and head of digital and securities markets at LSEG, said in a statement.

Rival venues are chasing the same idea. The New York Stock Exchange signed a memorandum of understanding with Securitize in March to build a marketplace for round-the-clock trading of tokenized U.S. equities and exchange traded funds, pending approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi, who laid out the company’s tokenization strategy on Unchained’s podcast last October, said an equity that trades around the clock and reaches an investor almost anywhere “starts to show what becomes possible when securities move onto blockchain rails.”

Related Listen: How Tokenized Stocks Could Undercut Interactive Brokers’ 77% Profit Margin

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