Payward, the operator of Kraken, will extend its xStocks tokenised-securities platform beyond US equities into Hong Kong, UK, European and South Korean listings under a partnership with infrastructure provider GTN announced on July 22, 2026. The obvious reading is market access. The more useful one is that this is a liquidity fix: tokenised equities have a structural hole where the underlying market is closed, and the only way to plug it is to own more time zones.
That hole is measurable. This publication documented it a year ago, when xStocks volumes fell 93% over a single US public holiday — a 24/7 market that stops trading when Wall Street does is not really a 24/7 market. Adding Hong Kong, London and Seoul listings staggers the clock so that a closed New York session is someone else’s open one. Nobody involved has framed it that way, but it is the most defensible commercial logic on the table.
What the deal covers
GTN supplies execution, custody, ledgering and record-keeping for the tokenised products, plus underlying asset accounting, across more than 90 markets and eight asset classes through a single application programming interface (API), per Crypto Briefing. The rollout order is Hong Kong-listed equities first, then UK, then continental Europe, then South Korea (GTN and Payward, July 22, 2026).
The platform’s current scale, per the companies: more than 500 tokenised securities covering equities, exchange-traded funds and initial public offerings, roughly $35 billion in cumulative transaction volume across several blockchains, and close to 200,000 holders. xStocks launched in June 2025, so those figures represent about 13 months of operation. Note that CoinDesk reported the volume figure as $37 billion; the $35 billion number is the one in the companies’ own release.
Mark Greenberg, Global Head of Payward Services, framed the rationale directly: “For decades, we’ve accepted that capital markets should be fragmented by country, currency, and market hours.” The reference to market hours is the tell — this is a trading-clock problem as much as a geography one.
The holder-base problem this does not solve
Volume is not the weak number in tokenised markets; distribution is. As we reported, tokenised real-world assets passed $31.76bn while the holder base stayed thin — a market where size is concentrated in very few wallets. xStocks’ own 200,000 holders against $35bn of cumulative volume implies an average turnover per holder that looks far more like an active-trader cohort than a retail investor base.
Adding three more equity markets widens the catalogue. It does not obviously widen the audience, and the constraint on the audience is regulatory rather than technical: each new jurisdiction requires its own clearance before institutional distribution can begin. GTN’s licensing position is what determines whether this becomes an institutional channel or another venue for the same crypto-native traders.
Ankit Shah, Global Head of FinTech at GTN, positioned the offer at institutions: “Financial institutions want to move into new asset classes and markets without rebuilding their technology.”
How the rest of the market is moving
The competitive field has shifted toward incumbents in the past month. DTCC ran its first live tokenised trades with more than 30 Wall Street firms, which puts the central securities depository — not a crypto exchange — at the centre of US tokenised settlement. Alpaca raised $435m and is targeting prime brokerage off a similar API-distribution thesis to GTN’s.
Neither Coinbase nor Binance has announced a comparable multi-market equity tokenisation push. Robinhood, which took reputational damage over its European tokenised-equity product, has stayed quiet on international listings. The silence is informative: the hard part is not minting a token against a share, it is the custody and record-keeping chain behind it in each jurisdiction, which is precisely the part Payward has outsourced to GTN rather than built.
What to watch
Two things will show whether this works. The first is whether volume distribution actually changes shape once Hong Kong listings are live — if Asian-hours trading remains a rounding error, the time-zone thesis fails and the expansion is just catalogue growth. The second is the sequence of regulatory clearances, since each market gates institutional distribution separately and Hong Kong’s own SFC virtual-asset dealer and custodian regime is still being finalised.
The reasonable expectation is slow. Tokenised equities have repeatedly shown they can add instruments faster than they can add holders, and nothing in this partnership addresses the demand side directly. What it does do is remove the excuse that the product only works while New York is open.
This article is informational analysis only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can lose substantial value rapidly. Past performance and historical patterns do not guarantee future results. Do your own research and consult a regulated financial adviser before making any investment decision.
Karthik Subramanian
Karthik Subramanian is a founder, writer, and technology consultant with nine years in the crypto ecosystem. He covers token economics, L1/L2 infrastructure, DeFi protocols, wallets/custody, and the bridge between crypto and forex—broker technology, liquidity, and macro drivers. Karthik’s writing focuses on clear, practical frameworks that help professionals evaluate new products and on-chain innovation alongside FX market realities.
