Kraken's Parent Is Quietly Building the Bridge Between Wall Street and Crypto

One company, two doors into Wall Street

Here's the thing worth noticing: Payward, the company behind Kraken, is trying to knock on two very different doors at once—and both lead to the same place.

On one side, it's tokenizing 100 London-listed stocks as "xStocks"—basically crypto versions of real shares that live on blockchain rails, with a platform called LSE 24 slated to support trading. On the other, it's reportedly the way in for Hyperliquid, a crypto derivatives exchange, to enter the US market for perpetuals—those never-expiring futures contracts that let traders bet on price with borrowed money (leverage).

Different products, same strategy. Payward is positioning itself as the connective tissue between old-school stocks and crypto-native trading.

The engineering isn't the hard part anymore. In this race, the paperwork is the product.

What's actually happening

The xStocks plan is straightforward on paper: take 100 London-listed companies, tokenize their shares, and let people trade them, with LSE 24 handling the trading side. Everything here is explicitly "subject to regulatory approval"—nothing's live yet.

On the Hyperliquid front, Bloomberg reported that Payward has presented the CFTC (the US regulator that oversees derivatives) with an outline of the proposed structure for offering crypto perpetuals to American traders. Again: approval is still pending.

Notice the pattern. Neither of these is a product you can use today. They're both applications sitting in a regulator's inbox. That's not a footnote—it's the whole story.

Why it matters: the tech is ready, the permission slip isn't

If you're a retail investor, the exciting version of this is a future where you buy a tokenized share of a London company and trade crypto perpetuals through the same pipes, built by the same people. That's the vision Payward is selling.

But the reason both plans carry the same asterisk—"pending approval"—tells you where the actual fight is. Tokenizing a stock or routing a perpetuals order isn't the hard part anymore. Getting a regulator to bless it is. Payward outlining a structure to the CFTC before it can touch US perpetuals is the tell: in this race, the paperwork is the product.

So the practical takeaway is patience. Watch the regulators, not the press releases. Until the CFTC signs off and the xStocks trading gets its green light, these are ambitions, not offerings—and neither timeline is something you can count on yet.

The bigger picture: everyone's chasing the same fusion

Payward isn't operating in a vacuum. Binance just added options on 1,000 US stocks and ETFs, and its TradFi perpetual futures volume hit roughly $433 billion in August—up about 15x since January. That's not a typo. Appetite for crypto-style trading of traditional assets is growing fast.

That context reframes Payward's two-front push. This looks less like a side project and more like a land grab. The bet is that the next big pool of money is traders who want exposure to traditional assets with crypto's speed, leverage, and always-on access—and whoever builds the regulated bridge first controls the toll booth.

What to watch next: any CFTC decision on the Hyperliquid structure, confirmation that LSE 24 trading of xStocks actually goes live, and whether US regulators decide tokenized stocks count as securities (which would drag in a whole other rulebook). The demand is showing up. The open question is who gets permission to serve it.