Kraken adds 200 European stocks and the whole DAX to xStocks, as tokens with no vote and no claim on the share

Payward, the parent company of Kraken, said on Wednesday 11 November 2026 that it has added more than 200 UK- and EU-listed companies to Kraken xStocks, its range of tokenized shares, including all 40 members of Germany’s DAX index. The tokens are not shares. They are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, a private company in Jersey, and Kraken’s own risk page says holders get no vote and no legal claim on the underlying stock. UK investors still cannot buy them, according to the Payward announcement, dated from St. Helier, Jersey.

The new batch takes the xStocks catalogue past 1,500 blockchain tokens that record a claim on an asset held off chain, such as Treasury bills, fund shares, loans or gold. A custodian keeps the asset, a transfer agent keeps the register, and the token is worth what that structure lets its holder claim.">tokenized assets, Payward said, and more UK and European names will be added “on a rolling basis”. Hundreds of Hong Kong-listed shares are due “in the coming weeks”. The company gave three figures for the whole xStocks business: more than $1.1 billion in assets under management, more than $45 billion in cumulative transaction volume and more than 550,000 unique holders.

“A portfolio should not have borders or trading hours,” said Mark Greenberg, Payward’s Chief Commercial Officer, in the release.

What Kraken xStocks added on 11 November

Payward’s release describes the first wave as the “most actively traded” companies listed in the UK and the EU. It does not publish the list, and it does not say which stock exchanges the shares come from. The only names confirmed on Wednesday came from a second announcement, published the same day by Deutsche Börse Group.

According to the Deutsche Börse release, tokenized versions of all 40 DAX constituents are now available as xStocks. Four tickers are given as examples: SAPx (SAP), SIEx (Siemens), ALV.DEx (Allianz) and DTE.DEx (Deutsche Telekom). Xetra-Gold, which the exchange group calls Europe’s largest physically backed gold security, has also been turned into an xStock.

The German group says the tokens trade on 360X, an affiliated platform that has been regulated under the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime since February 2026. Its headline speaks of trading around the clock, but the body limits that to “select venues”, and a footnote says trading hours vary by venue. On Kraken, for clients in the European Economic Area (EEA), xStocks trade 24 hours a day, five days a week, not seven.

“Our vision is to provide a unified hybrid exchange ecosystem,” said Carlo Kölzer, Head of FX and Digital Asset at Deutsche Börse Group and Co-CEO of 360X. Greenberg, quoted again in the Deutsche Börse text, presented the DAX tokens as a way for investors in Southeast Asia and Latin America to reach German blue chips.

The tokens live on several blockchains. Payward lists Solana, Ethereum, TON, Ink and X Layer “among others”, and eligible users can trade them on Kraken and on the other platforms of what Payward calls the xStocks Alliance. Payward calls the UK and the EU the first expansion markets delivered under its partnership with GTN, which handles execution and custody of the traditional shares. GTN is a fintech infrastructure firm that, according to Payward, operates through six regulated entities, including ones overseen by the UK’s FCA, Singapore’s MAS and Hong Kong’s SFC.

What is an xStock? A Jersey note, not a share

Each xStock is “backed 1:1” by the underlying share, held by a “regulated custodian”, Payward says. The release does not name that custodian. Kraken’s xStocks legal and risk page says only that the underlying stocks are kept in “depositary institutions” under a custody agreement.

What the buyer owns is a claim on the Jersey issuer, not a piece of SAP or Siemens. Kraken’s page is blunt about it: holders “do not have ownership in any of the underlying stock or shares”, and they have no voting rights, no distribution entitlements and no legal claims to the stock. If the underlying company is liquidated, the token gives no claim on what is left. The same page warns that the issuer may act on the underlying shares “without taking into account the interests” of xStocks holders.

Backed itself describes each xStock as a “bearer debt instrument” classed as a tracker certificate and issued by a Jersey special-purpose vehicle, according to a client alert by PwC Legal in Germany published on 14 September 2026. In plain terms, the holder lends to a small offshore company whose job is to hold the shares and track their price. The value of the note depends on that company, its custody chain and the platform the token sits on.

Some of the practical rules are on Kraken’s page rather than in Wednesday’s releases. Dividends are not paid out in cash: they are “automatically reinvested” into more of the same token. Holders may redeem their xStocks with Backed, for an extra fee. Kraken also says the investment exposes the buyer to the financial and operational risks of Kraken itself and to liquidity risk, and that it “may result in the total loss of invested capital”.

Two more lines in the paperwork matter for European buyers. Payward writes that xStocks “are not, nor will they be registered with any local securities regulators”, and the Deutsche Börse footnotes add that they are not insured by the FDIC or SIPC, the US deposit and broker-failure schemes. The legal documents behind the product are a Base Prospectus and Final Terms published by Backed; neither release mentions a key information document for retail investors.

The DLT Pilot Regime cited by Deutsche Börse is an EU framework for market infrastructures that use blockchains. It applies to the 360X venue. Nothing in either release says it changes what the token holder owns, and Kraken’s disclosure still says the holder owns no shares.

ESMA flagged Kraken’s tokenized stocks in September

The structure is not new to EU supervisors. In its Report on Trends, Risks and Vulnerabilities (TRV) Risk Monitor No. 2, 2026, published on 10 September, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) devoted an in-depth section to tokenized equities. It estimated their outstanding value at about EUR 0.3 billion at the end of 2024 and about EUR 1.9 billion by the end of June 2026, a 6.5-fold rise in eighteen months, concentrated in a few large US technology stocks.

A footnote in that section names two firms. Robinhood and Kraken, ESMA wrote, offer tokenized equities that give EU investors easier access to mostly US tech stocks “by repackaging US economic exposure into an EU-accessible instrument”. ESMA names the platforms, not the xStocks product.

ESMA calls these products “wrapped” structures: tokens that represent a claim on, or economic exposure to, shares held by a trusted party. They are easier to build because they do not touch company law or shareholder registers. The cost, in ESMA’s words, is that legal ownership stays off-chain, so token transfers “do not convey legal title”. The report adds that wrapped tokens can bring extra layers of intermediation, more complexity for investors and new dependencies on tokenization platforms and on the custodians of the shares.

The regulator also questioned two selling points. Longer trading hours are a tangible benefit, it wrote, but they also reflect the spread of online trading platforms, and fractional ownership can be had through existing products. And when several tokens that are not fully interchangeable track the same share on different platforms, liquidity can split across venues. That may hurt price discovery in periods of stress, and thinner markets are easier to manipulate.

PwC Legal summed up the gap in one line: “The token changes hands. The share does not.” The law firm also stressed that the TRV is risk monitoring, not binding guidance, and that ESMA did not say wrapped structures are unlawful.

Can you buy Kraken xStocks in the UK or the EU?

In the EEA, yes, through Kraken, provided the client is eligible. Payward says investment services in the EEA are provided by Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, authorised by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) under licence 342/17. Offers to eligible Kraken customers are made through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd., licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority. Readers in France, Italy, Germany or Spain are therefore dealing with a Cypriot entity, not with a local broker supervised at home.

In the UK, no. The expansion does not change that: xStocks “remain unavailable” to UK investors, Cointelegraph reported on Wednesday, in line with Payward’s release. Kraken’s legal page lists four countries where xStocks cannot be accessed at all: the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. British investors are therefore shut out of tokens built on London-listed companies.

Payward says xStocks are offered in more than 110 markets. The Deutsche Börse release makes the target audience explicit when it quotes Greenberg on investors in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

For a step-by-step explanation of wrapped tokens, synthetic exposure and what a holder can claim in a failure, see our guide to tokenized stocks and what you really own. Our Kraken exchange review covers the platform’s licences, fees and EU entities.

$45 billion traded and 550,000 holders: xStocks is third by market value

All of these are company figures, and the two releases issued on Wednesday do not quite agree. Payward’s own text gives more than 550,000 unique holders, more than $1.1 billion under management and more than 1,500 tokenized assets. The text published by Deutsche Börse, which quotes the same Payward executive, gives more than 500,000 holders, more than $1 billion and more than 1,300 xStocks. Both put total transaction volume above $45 billion. Neither says how a unique holder is counted across chains and platforms.

Independent data put xStocks third among issuers. Token Terminal, cited by Cointelegraph on 11 November, values xStocks at $1.1 billion, about 22% of the $4.9 billion of tokenized stocks it tracks, behind Binance’s bStocks at $1.5 billion and Ondo Finance at $1.4 billion.

The ESMA and Token Terminal totals are not directly comparable: they use different dates, currencies and scopes. Both show a market that is still small next to listed equities, which ESMA itself calls negligible, and growing fast from a low base.

Volume on tokenized stocks has also been concentrated elsewhere. On BNB Chain, one Nasdaq-100 token made up 80% of $25.6 billion traded in the third quarter, as we reported in our look at BNB Chain’s tokenized stock volumes. Payward did not break down its $45 billion by stock or by chain.

Kraken, Robinhood and the other routes to tokenized stocks

Kraken is not the only crypto platform selling stock tokens to Europeans. ESMA’s September footnote puts Robinhood in the same category as Kraken: easier access for EU investors to mostly US tech stocks through a repackaged instrument. The supervisor did not name any other provider in that passage.

Other projects take a different route, with a licensed venue and restricted access. In the US, Formation told the SEC it will run a round-the-clock tokenized stock venue on Solana, open only to verified investors from early 2027, as described in our report on Formation’s filing. In Europe, Amundi put a STOXX Europe 600 fund on Ethereum, a tokenized fund share rather than a note, covered in our piece on Amundi’s tokenized index fund.

Deutsche Börse is not a newcomer to xStocks. The two groups have worked together since December 2025, and xStocks were already trading on 360X before Wednesday, according to the exchange group. What changes is the scope: a venue affiliated with the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange now carries tokens that track every DAX company, while the shares themselves keep trading on Xetra during normal market hours.

What the announcement does not say

Several points a buyer would want to know are not in Wednesday’s releases:

• the name of the custodian that holds the European shares;
• the full list of the 200-plus companies, and which exchanges beyond Frankfurt they come from;
• fees and spreads on Kraken for the new tokens, and how prices are set while the home exchanges are closed;
• how dividends from European companies, and the withholding tax on them, flow into the automatic reinvestment;
• how any national regulator in the EU classifies the notes.

Kraken’s legal page has not caught up with the launch either. On Wednesday it still described xStocks as tokenized representations of US stocks and ETFs.

Our own reading of the documents, not a statement from Payward, points to three risks that come from the structure. The holder is exposed to a Jersey issuer and to custodians it does not choose; Kraken’s page itself mentions the credit risk of the depositary institutions Backed uses. The token price can drift from the share when trading is thin, the fragmentation risk ESMA described. And because xStocks trade 24/5 on Kraken in the EEA, a client there cannot sell on Kraken at the weekend, even if news breaks. This is a description of the product, not investment advice.

Next: Hong Kong shares within weeks, London on LSE 24 in 2027

xStocks launched in June 2025 with tokenized US shares and ETFs, according to both releases. Payward calls Wednesday’s batch the widest move beyond US listings so far, and it does not plan to stop at Europe.

Payward said hundreds of Hong Kong-listed equities are expected in the coming weeks. On London, the release says Wednesday’s batch delivers on the plan, agreed in Payward’s recent partnership with the London Stock Exchange, to tokenize the top 100 London-listed equities. It adds that in 2027, subject to regulatory approval, the exchange intends to list xStocks and start trading them on LSE 24, its extended-hours venue.

The UK date to watch is that approval. Until it comes, tokens tracking UK-listed companies can be bought by eligible clients in Paris, Milan or Frankfurt through a Cypriot entity, but not by investors in London.