Kraken Opens 7,000+ US Stocks to EEA Users Weeks After xStocks’ SpaceX Shortfall

Kraken opened trading in more than 7,000 US-listed stocks to customers across the European Economic Area on Tuesday, letting them buy and hold real shares through the same account as its crypto and tokenized-stock products. The stock trading runs through Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, a Cyprus-licensed brokerage arm whose authorization, verified directly against Cyprus’s regulator, has been active since November 2017, nearly eight years before Kraken had a tokenized-stock product to license at all.

Kraken had already been quietly running stock trading in Germany, the Netherlands and France before Tuesday’s EEA-wide release. Trading runs through Kraken Pro and the Kraken mobile app, commission-free on the stock side, though spreads and foreign-exchange costs still apply. Kraken’s own announcement framed the move as putting “US-listed stocks and xStocks available side-by-side in a single regulated account,” in the words of Mark Greenberg, chief commercial officer of Payward.

7,000+ US stocks are now available to EEA users in the Kraken app 🇪🇺

Invest in stocks, tokenized equities, and crypto all in one platform.

Explore stocks ⤵️https://t.co/0BVtXJ2tf1 pic.twitter.com/ApYmHxNzOF

— Kraken (@krakenfx) August 18, 2026

How Kraken ended up owning the token behind its own stock play

The tokenized half of that pitch, xStocks, started as a much smaller and separately owned product. Kraken launched it in June 2025 through a partnership with Backed Finance, then opened it to EU clients that September. Volume grew fast: past $10 billion by November, past $25 billion by February. In December, Kraken agreed to buy Backed outright, folding the company that actually issues the tokens into its own structure, while Kraken acquires Reap marks another major expansion of Payward’s financial-services business. By March, xStocks had grown from 60 assets to 100, added a Nasdaq partnership to develop token infrastructure, and launched its own execution layer, xChange, supporting more than 70 tokens directly on-chain.

• Jun 30, 2025: xStocks launches for eligible non-U.S. customers
• Sep 10, 2025: xStocks expands to EU clients
• Sep 19, 2025: Trust Wallet joins the xStocks Alliance
• Nov 12, 2025: xStocks surpasses $10B in transaction volume
• Dec 2, 2025: Kraken agrees to acquire Backed Finance
• Feb 19, 2026: xStocks crosses $25B in transaction volume
• Feb 24, 2026: Kraken launches tokenized-equity perpetual futures
• Mar 5, 2026: Kraken launches the xChange execution layer
• Mar 9, 2026: Payward partners with Nasdaq on tokenized-equity infrastructure
• Mar 18, 2026: xStocks reaches 100 tokenized assets
• Jun 5, 2026: Kraken opens tokenized SpaceX IPO access
• Jun 13, 2026: Kraken’s tokenized SpaceX offering fails to deliver real shares
• Aug 5, 2026: Payward adds proxy voting rights through Broadridge
• Aug 18, 2026: Kraken launches trading in 7,000+ U.S. stocks for eligible EEA customers

The SpaceX shares that never showed up

In June, Kraken opened access to SPCXx, a token meant to track SpaceX equity ahead of the company’s IPO, in more than 110 countries. Three other platforms, Binance Wallet, Bitget Wallet and MEXC, offered the same access through the same xStocks infrastructure. When SpaceX’s IPO priced, none of the promised shares arrived. Binance Wallet refunded roughly $557 million in stablecoins across 27,700 wallets.

Kraken’s own subscribers fared little better, receiving a small fraction of the tokens they had signed up for. The tokens involved were never shares in the first place. SPCXx and products like it are tracker certificates, priced to follow a stock without carrying voting rights or shareholder status.

Kraken Adds Shareholder Voting to xStocks as Ownership Rights Expand

On August 5, Payward reversed an earlier position and began letting xStocks holders submit proxy voting instructions through a partnership with Broadridge, the proxy-services firm that handles that function for traditional brokerages. “The endgame for tokenization was never just building faster programmable capital markets,” Greenberg said. “It’s about giving people across the world everything that comes with owning a piece of a company, including a voice in how it’s run.” That change addressed a structural gap in the tokenized product, the absence of shareholder rights, that had nothing to do with the delivery failure two months earlier. Both issues sit on the same product line.

The License Behind Kraken’s Stock Offering

Kraken’s real stock offering runs through a different structure entirely. Cyprus’s securities regulator lists Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited as holding license 342/17, active, authorized on November 13, 2017.

Field	Value
Entity	Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited
License	342/17
Status	Active
Authorized since	13 November 2017
Regulator	Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission

That license predates xStocks by nearly eight years and sits under MiFID II, the same European framework that governs traditional brokerages. It is not the entity that owns or issues the tokens. The distinction matters because regulators have been openly skeptical of the tokenized category this year. The World Federation of Exchanges wrote in an August 2025 position paper that such products are “not stocks,” despite being marketed to resemble them, and warned they invite regulatory arbitrage. The Bank of Lithuania, which oversees Robinhood’s EU operations, said it had contacted the company for clarification on the structure and consumer communication around its own tokenized stock offerings. 

What happens to the rest of Kraken’s tokenized push

Kraken’s parent, Payward, is still trying to expand xStocks beyond the US stock list, into Hong Kong, the UK and South Korea, an effort it announced in July. That expansion, along with its broader push into financial products including Kraken Onyx Odds, and the pending IPO Payward has been preparing for since at least March, both depend on xStocks working the way Kraken says it does. Real stock trading does not carry that dependency. It settles the way every other regulated brokerage’s stock trading settles, through custody and clearing systems that don’t run through Backed at all.