Kraken opened trading in more than 7,000 US-listed stocks to customers across the European Economic Area on Tuesday, letting them buy and hold real shares through the same account as its cryp
Kraken opened trading in more than 7,000 US-listed stocks to customers across the European Economic Area on Tuesday, letting them buy and hold real shares through the same account as its crypto and tokenized-stock products. The stock trading runs through Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, a Cyprus-licensed brokerage arm whose authorization, verified directly against Cyprus’s regulator, has been active since November 2017, nearly eight years before Kraken had a tokenized-stock product to license at all.
Kraken had already been quietly running stock trading in Germany, the Netherlands and France before Tuesday’s EEA-wide release. Trading runs through Kraken Pro and the Kraken mobile app, commission-free on the stock side, though spreads and foreign-exchange costs still apply. Kraken’s own announcement framed the move as putting “US-listed stocks and xStocks available side-by-side in a single regulated account,” in the words of Mark Greenberg, chief commercial officer of Payward.
7,000+ US stocks are now available to EEA users in the Kraken app
Invest in stocks, tokenized equities, and crypto all in one platform.
Explore stocks
https://t.co/0BVtXJ2tf1pic.twitter.com/ApYmHxNzOF
— Kraken (@krakenfx) August 18, 2026
The tokenized half of that pitch, xStocks, started as a much smaller and separately owned product. Kraken launched it in June 2025 through a partnership with Backed Finance, then opened it to EU clients that September. Volume grew fast: past $10 billion by November, past $25 billion by February. In December, Kraken agreed to buy Backed outright, folding the company that actually issues the tokens into its own structure, while Kraken acquires Reap marks another major expansion of Payward’s financial-services business. By March, xStocks had grown from 60 assets to 100, added a Nasdaq partnership to develop token infrastructure, and launched its own execution layer, xChange, supporting more than 70 tokens directly on-chain.
In June, Kraken opened access to SPCXx, a token meant to track SpaceX equity ahead of the company’s IPO, in more than 110 countries. Three other platforms, Binance Wallet, Bitget Wallet and MEXC, offered the same access through the same xStocks infrastructure. When SpaceX’s IPO priced, none of the promised shares arrived. Binance Wallet refunded roughly $557 million in stablecoins across 27,700 wallets.
Kraken’s own subscribers fared little better, receiving a small fraction of the tokens they had signed up for. The tokens involved were never shares in the first place. SPCXx and products like it are tracker certificates, priced to follow a stock without carrying voting rights or shareholder status.
On August 5, Payward reversed an earlier position and began letting xStocks holders submit proxy voting instructions through a partnership with Broadridge, the proxy-services firm that handles that function for traditional brokerages. “The endgame for tokenization was never just building faster programmable capital markets,” Greenberg said. “It’s about giving people across the world everything that comes with owning a piece of a company, including a voice in how it’s run.” That change addressed a structural gap in the tokenized product, the absence of shareholder rights, that had nothing to do with the delivery failure two months earlier. Both issues sit on the same product line.
Kraken’s real stock offering runs through a different structure entirely. Cyprus’s securities regulator lists Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited as holding license 342/17, active, authorized on November 13, 2017.
FieldValueEntityPayward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) LimitedLicense342/17StatusActiveAuthorized since13 November 2017RegulatorCyprus Securities and Exchange Commission That license predates xStocks by nearly eight years and sits under MiFID II, the same European framework that governs traditional brokerages. It is not the entity that owns or issues the tokens. The distinction matters because regulators have been openly skeptical of the tokenized category this year. The World Federation of Exchanges wrote in an August 2025 position paper that such products are “not stocks,” despite being marketed to resemble them, and warned they invite regulatory arbitrage. The Bank of Lithuania, which oversees Robinhood’s EU operations, said it had contacted the company for clarification on the structure and consumer communication around its own tokenized stock offerings.Kraken’s parent, Payward, is still trying to expand xStocks beyond the US stock list, into Hong Kong, the UK and South Korea, an effort it announced in July. That expansion, along with its broader push into financial products including Kraken Onyx Odds, and the pending IPO Payward has been preparing for since at least March, both depend on xStocks working the way Kraken says it does. Real stock trading does not carry that dependency. It settles the way every other regulated brokerage’s stock trading settles, through custody and clearing systems that don’t run through Backed at all.
