Kraken sells the share and its token side by side, under two laws

What happened

Kraken announced on its own blog at 08:30 UTC on 18 August 2026 that US-listed stocks are live across the European Economic Area, giving eligible customers more than 7,000 US equities alongside more than 600 cryptoassets and its xStocks tokens in one account. The service is provided by Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, authorised and regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission under licence number 342/17, and trading runs on Kraken Pro on desktop and mobile and on the Kraken app, without commission but subject to spreads and foreign exchange costs. Mark Greenberg, chief commercial officer of Payward and head of Payward Services, said the launch 'eliminates the artificial divide between traditional and tokenized formats of the same asset' and that with the two available side by side in a single regulated account 'customers can choose how they access the same underlying exposure (whether through traditional shares or tokenized representation) without moving capital or changing platforms'. Kraken says it is the only crypto-native platform offering European customers regulated access to both US stocks and tokenized versions of the same assets in one trading environment. A spokesperson told The Block the rollout had been running quietly in Germany, the Netherlands and France in recent days and would be fully live across the region from today, that customers must accept additional terms before trading shares, and that access will not appear automatically for every existing customer in the region. The footer of the same release sets out what the tokens are: xStocks are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, a Jersey private limited company, offered to eligible customers through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd, licensed to conduct digital asset business by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and 'are not nor will be registered with any local securities regulators'. They are not available in the United States or to US persons, and the release points to a base prospectus and final terms held on Backed's own site.

Why it matters

The release's claim is that the format is now the customer's choice and the exposure is the same either way. The exposure is the same and the instrument is not. One leg is a US share bought through a MiFID investment firm supervised in Cyprus, with the client-asset, best-execution and appropriateness machinery that regime carries. The other is a bearer certificate issued by a Jersey company under a base prospectus, distributed by a Bermuda-licensed entity, and by the seller's own statement registered with no securities regulator anywhere. A reader who takes the two as interchangeable is taking the price for the instrument. Kraken's own documents also qualify the phrase side by side more sharply than any report has. Its support page for xStocks availability, last updated on 18 June 2026 and serving this morning, says that clients in the region must pass a questionnaire before gaining access, that they may buy, sell and convert xStocks using fiat only, and that xStocks trading via the order books is not available to them on Kraken Pro or through the Kraken interface for programmatic access at all, being available only through the Convert feature. On that page the two formats are in one account and are not traded the same way inside it: the share has an order book and the token has a conversion screen. What tokenization is worth over the share it tracks comes down, on Kraken's own account, to hours outside the exchange session, transfer to a self-custody wallet and use in onchain applications. Put the share on the same screen and those three are the whole of the premium, and the first of them is the one a conversion-only route is least able to deliver at a competitive price.

What is not settled

How many xStocks there are is unsettled inside one document. The release's own standfirst says 100+ xStocks and its body says more than 700+ xStocks, on the same page on the same morning; The Block reported over 700, and this site's register carries more than 100. None of the three is a reading of a list. Whether the availability page has been revised for this launch is not stated: its last-updated date is two months old, and Kraken did not say in the release whether the order book restriction still holds now that the shares are alongside. The price relationship between the two formats is not addressed anywhere: if the token cannot be traded on the order book in the region and the share can, the two will not always print the same, and nothing in the release says how a customer would know. No terms of the appropriateness questionnaire are published. And at the time of writing only one outlet had covered the launch at all, so there is no second account of what eligible means or of how many customers it reaches.