Kraken brings 7,000 US stocks and their tokenized twins to Europe

Kraken opened access to more than 7,000 US-listed stocks for customers across the European Economic Area, alongside the 700-plus tokenized xStocks versions of those same equities the exchange already offers, putting both formats in a single account for the first time, the company announced.

The service runs under Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, Kraken's Cyprus-licensed entity, authorized by CySEC under MiFID II. Trading is commission-free for eligible customers, though spreads and FX costs still apply, and access runs through Kraken Pro and the Kraken mobile app. The traditional shares and the tokenized xStocks sit in the same regulated account rather than separate products: xStocks are backed 1:1 by the underlying shares, can be sent to self-custody wallets, and trade even when the underlying US market is closed — a combination Kraken says has already pushed xStocks past $38 billion in total transaction volume since launch. The stock side isn't tokenized at all; it's ordinary equity ownership sitting next to a blockchain-native mirror of the same asset, with the customer choosing which format to hold. The service is explicitly closed to US persons, the same restriction that applies to most crypto-native equity products built to route around US retail brokerage rules rather than compete with them directly.

“This launch eliminates the artificial divide between traditional and tokenized formats of the same asset.”

— Mark Greenberg, Chief Commercial Officer of Payward and Head of Payward Services

That access gap is exactly what's made this kind of product attractive to build in the first place. EU retail investors have spent years running into a wall many US brokers built for their own convenience: without a EU-compliant Key Information Document, a requirement under the bloc's PRIIPs rules, plenty of US-listed stocks and nearly all US ETFs simply aren't offered to EU clients by mainstream brokers, regardless of demand. A regulated venue offering the shares directly, with the paperwork already sorted at the platform level, sidesteps that friction instead of asking each broker to solve it individually, which is a large part of why a crypto exchange rather than a legacy broker ended up building this particular bridge.

Kraken is betting that combining both formats in one account beats picking a side, and it's not the only exchange making that bet: Crypto.com joined the same race toward tokenized US equities earlier this month, part of a wider push by crypto exchanges to capture demand for Wall Street exposure without routing customers through a traditional broker. The timing also lines up with the regulatory reality that's reshaped who can even run this kind of product in Europe: MiCA's full enforcement this summer cut the number of licensed crypto firms in the bloc by roughly 92%, leaving a small group of MiFID- and MiCA-compliant platforms, Kraken among them, to absorb the demand that unlicensed competitors can no longer legally serve. Offering regulated access to both US equities and their tokenized twins under one CySEC licence is as much a compliance moat as a product feature at this point — one most of Kraken's former EU competitors, stripped of their licences in this summer's shakeout, are no longer positioned to build at all.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.