Nasdaq plans tokenized stocks with shareholder rights by 2027

Nasdaq isn’t just talking about putting stocks on the blockchain anymore. It’s writing nine-figure checks to make it happen.

Nasdaq Ventures invested $100 million in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, at a $21 billion valuation. The goal: launch Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs, in the second quarter of 2027, giving shareholders the same voting rights, governance protections, and legal standing they’d get from holding traditional shares.

What Nasdaq is actually building

NETs are designed as blockchain-based representations of stocks listed on Nasdaq. They’ll support 24/7 trading and on-chain settlements, meaning markets wouldn’t shut down at 4 PM Eastern or take two days to finalize a trade.

The critical design choice here is what Nasdaq calls an “issuer-sponsored” model. Public companies will maintain control over their ownership records and corporate governance. If you hold a NET, you’re not holding a derivative or a synthetic wrapper that roughly tracks a stock’s price. You hold the real thing, with the legal rights attached.

Most existing tokenized stock products are synthetic, meaning you’re essentially holding a financial contract that mirrors a stock’s price movement. You don’t get to vote at shareholder meetings. You don’t have a direct claim on company assets.

Nasdaq President Tal Cohen and Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi have both emphasized building a transparent and trustworthy market environment, one where the token and the underlying security are functionally identical from a legal standpoint.

The Kraken connection

Payward’s xStocks platform will serve as the primary infrastructure for distributing these digital assets. The partnership between Nasdaq and Payward traces back to a March 2026 announcement that outlined their collaboration on distributing tokenized stocks internationally.

The September 2026 investment effectively deepens that relationship from a commercial partnership into a strategic alignment backed by serious capital. Nasdaq isn’t just licensing its brand to a crypto platform. It’s funding the buildout of the technology stack that will power its own tokenized equity offering.

Why the ONDO comparison keeps coming up

The original source material drew a pointed contrast between Nasdaq’s approach and Ondo Finance, one of the most prominent names in the tokenized asset space. The argument is straightforward: ONDO token holders don’t have a claim on the collateral backing Ondo’s products or on the fees the protocol generates. The token has declined in value, and Nasdaq’s NETs could grow the tokenized stock market without it.

Nasdaq’s model sidesteps that dynamic entirely. There’s no intermediary governance token between the investor and the underlying equity. The token is the equity.

Regulatory groundwork

Nasdaq filed a proposal with the SEC in September 2025 to facilitate tokenized trading, laying the regulatory groundwork more than a year before committing capital to the initiative.

What this means for markets

If NETs launch on schedule in Q2 2027, they would represent one of the first instances of a major exchange operator offering blockchain-native versions of its own listed stocks with full shareholder rights.

Settlement times could collapse from the current T+1 standard to near-instant finality on-chain. Round-the-clock trading would eliminate the artificial constraints of market hours.

For institutional investors, on-chain settlement introduces programmability. Dividend distributions, corporate actions, and proxy voting could all be automated through smart contracts, reducing the overhead that custodians and transfer agents currently manage.

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