Wall Street’s biggest exchanges are embracing digital assets by aiming to put the $126 trillion stock market on blockchains — but they’re not going it alone; rather, they rely on crypto exchanges to get there.
Over the past week, two of the world’s most powerful exchange operators – Nasdaq and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange – have teamed up with digital asset exchanges to merge stocks with blockchains through tokenization.
Nasdaq is developing a framework that will enable listed companies to issue blockchain-based versions of their shares while retaining traditional ownership rights and management. To distribute these tokenized shares globally, the exchange works with Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken. The offer could go live as early as the first half of 2027.
Meanwhile, a few days earlier, ICE revealed a strategic investment in crypto exchange OKX worth $25 billion. This deal includes plans to launch new tokenized stocks and crypto futures, allowing the exchange operator to tap into OKX’s 120 million user base.
The “Alt” stock exchange
The many agreements point to a major transformation in how markets can function in the future.
For decades, stocks, bonds and funds were traded on separate systems with limited opening hours. Blockchain technology promises a unified marketplace that’s always on—one that the industry believes could eventually host the settlement of all financial assets in the form of tokens.
Antoine Scalia, founder and CEO of crypto accounting and compliance platform Cryptio, said the development points to a broader shift toward what he calls the “everything exchange” — a marketplace where all asset classes trade on the same infrastructure.
“For a very long time, only crypto people pushed the narrative that traditional finance and crypto would merge,” Scalia said. “Now we see the big stock exchanges in motion.”
“It’s a recognition that all assets will eventually sit on blockchain rails,” he said.
This shift is being accelerated by an SEC staff statement on tokenized securities in January, which finally clarified that tokenized shares have the same legal weight as their “paper” counterparts. It gives the Wall Street incumbents the legal cover to enter the tokenized stock trading market.
‘Frenemy’
However, the key question, Scalia added, is which platforms will dominate the future market: traditional exchanges like Nasdaq or crypto-native venues like Coinbase (COIN) and Kraken.
But that doesn’t mean the two sides are pure rivals. In many cases, they need each other.
Traditional exchanges are looking for access to crypto-native traders, while crypto platforms want the distribution and credibility that established financial infrastructure provides, Scalia said.
“Distribution works both ways,” he said. “Traditional exchanges want exposure to the crypto trading population, and there is strong demand from crypto users to trade other types of assets. At the same time, crypto-native firms are taking advantage of the reach of these traditional players to bring more people into crypto markets.”
The result is an unusual, “frenemy”-like relationship between potential competitors. “It’s a very interesting dynamic of friction and complementarity,” Scalia said. “And it will be interesting to see how that plays out.”
Why Tokenized Shares Matter
Tokenized stocks—currently $1 billion—are only a fraction of the global stock market, but the potential is massive as all kinds of assets increasingly move toward non-stop, around-the-clock trading.
A joint report by Boston Consulting Group and Ripple predicted that tokenized assets could grow by 53% per year and reach $18.9 trillion across all asset classes by 2033 as their base case.
The market for tokenized shares showed even faster growth. Market capitalization has tripled since mid-2025, RWA.xyz data shows, as Kraken, Ondo Finance, Robinhood and a number of other exchanges and issuers rolled out tokenized versions of shares.
The biggest benefit of putting traditional stocks on blockchains is ongoing price discovery, said Yuki Yuminaga, founder of tokenization startup Tenbin Labs. Unlike traditional stock markets today, which operate on fixed business hours, blockchain-based assets never sleep and can be traded around the clock. This is likely to free up more capital, improve liquidity and reduce market volatility.
Tokenizing stocks can also unlock more efficient lending and borrowing through decentralized finance (DeFi), Yuminaga added. Tokenized shares could be used as collateral in the loan markets, increasing capital efficiency and enabling new funding opportunities, he said.
Giants like Nasdaq and NYSE getting into the tokenized equity game could also solve one of the biggest current pain points: liquidity.
“Tokenized stocks have struggled with liquidity because traditional markets and onchain markets are separate,” Yuminaga said. “If Nasdaq connects the two pools of liquidity, that could change the equation.”
