Kraken's Parent Company Payward Expands xStocks to International Markets Including Hong Kong, UK, and South Korea
Payward announced the expansion of its tokenized stock platform xStocks from the U.S. stock market to Hong Kong, the UK, South Korea, and other international markets, in collaboration with GTN to introduce stocks listed in Hong Kong.
The platform previously supported over 500 types of tokenized securities, with a cumulative trading volume exceeding $35 billion and nearly 200,000 holders; this expansion aims to gradually bring global capital markets on-chain, with plans to support UK, European, and South Korean stocks in the future.
In terms of market mechanisms, intensified competition in tokenized securities drives funds towards platforms that offer global asset coverage. Crypto-native institutions like Kraken attract international retail and institutional investors through on-chain versions, while traditional exchanges accelerate their on-chain strategies. Overall capital is shifting from traditional stock custody to blockchain settlement, with Citigroup predicting the market size could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.
Source: Public Information
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Kraken has previously made strategic moves in the RWA sector through acquisitions and product iterations. The international expansion of xStocks continues its strategic path from crypto trading to the on-chaining of traditional assets, similar to the early expansions of platforms like Coinbase from spot to derivatives.
In terms of capital pathways, Payward's collaboration with GTN secures market infrastructure in places like Hong Kong, mobilizing resources to convert traditional stocks into on-chain versions, attracting global investor funds on-chain, while paving the way for other tokenized asset categories in the future.
Similar to the early electronic trading of NASDAQ or the traditional asset securitization wave, xStocks is currently in the expansion phase of tokenized securities moving from U.S.-dominance to global multi-market coverage.
This essentially represents a restructuring of the industry chain: tokenization reduces cross-border settlement and custody costs, capital accelerates towards blockchain infrastructure and global asset issuers, and traditional exchanges and crypto platforms jointly drive the transformation of capital market trading structures from centralized custody to distributed settlement.
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- Asset tokenization first penetrates locally, then expands to global coverage.
- The larger the traditional market, the more significant the liquidity increment after going on-chain.
- When competition heats up, infrastructure cooperation determines the speed of expansion.