Wall Street’s biggest exchanges are embracing digital assets with their sights set on putting the $126 trillion stock market on blockchains – but they’re not doing it alone; rather, they rely on crypto exchanges to achieve this.
Over the past week, two of the world’s most powerful stock exchange operators – Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange – have partnered with digital asset exchanges to merge stocks with blockchains via tokenization.
Nasdaq is developing a framework that would allow publicly traded companies to issue blockchain-based versions of their shares while preserving traditional ownership rights and governance. To distribute these tokenized stocks worldwide, the exchange works with Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken. The offer could go online from the first half of 2027.
Meanwhile, a few days earlier, ICE revealed a strategic investment in crypto exchange OKX worth $25 billion. This agreement will see the launch of new tokenized stocks and crypto futures contracts, allowing the exchange operator to tap into OKX’s 120 million user base.
The exchange of “everything”
The flurry of transactions hints at a larger transformation in how markets could operate in the future.
For decades, stocks, bonds and funds traded on separate systems with limited trading hours. Blockchain technology promises a unified, always-on market – one that the industry believes could eventually accommodate the settlement of all financial assets in tokenized form.
Antoine Scalia, founder and CEO of crypto accounting and compliance platform Cryptio, said the developments indicate a broader shift toward what he calls “the exchange of everything” — a marketplace where all asset classes trade on the same infrastructure.
“For the longest time, it was just crypto people pushing the narrative that traditional finance and crypto were going to merge,” Scalia said. “Now we see the main exchanges evolving.”
“It’s a realization that eventually all assets will be settled on blockchain rails,” he said.
This change is accelerated by a January SEC staff statement on tokenized securities, which ultimately clarified that tokenized stocks carry the same legal weight as their “paper” counterparts. This gives Wall Street incumbents the legal cover to enter the tokenized stock trading market.
‘Enemy’
However, the key question, Scalia added, is which platforms will dominate this future market: traditional exchanges like Nasdaq or crypto-native platforms such as Coinbase (COIN) and Kraken.
But that doesn’t mean the two sides are purely rivals. In many cases, they need each other.
Traditional exchanges seek access to crypto-native traders, while crypto platforms want the distribution and credibility that established financial infrastructures provide, Scalia said.
“Distribution works both ways,” he said. “Traditional exchanges want exposure to the crypto trading population, and crypto users have huge demand for trading other types of assets. At the same time, crypto-native companies are taking advantage of the reach of these traditional players to attract more people to crypto markets.”
The result is an unusual, “frantic enemy”-like relationship between potential competitors. “It’s a very interesting dynamic, with friction and complementarity,” Scalia said. “And it will be interesting to see how that plays out.”
Why Tokenized Stocks Matter
Tokenized stocks – currently worth $1 billion – represent just a fraction of the global stock market, but the potential is enormous as all kinds of assets increasingly move toward continuous, 24-hour trading.
A joint report from the Boston Consulting Group and Ripple projects that tokenized assets could grow 53% annually, reaching $18.9 trillion across all asset classes by 2033, as a base case scenario.
The tokenized stock market has grown even faster. The market value has tripled since mid-2025, according to data from RWA.xyz, as Kraken, Ondo Finance, Robinhood and many other exchanges and issuers have rolled out tokenized versions of shares.
The biggest advantage of placing traditional stocks on blockchains is continuous price discovery, said Yuki Yuminaga, founder of tokenization startup Tenbin Labs. Unlike today’s traditional stock markets, which operate at fixed trading hours, blockchain-based assets never sleep and can be traded 24 hours a day. This will likely unlock more capital, improve liquidity, and reduce market volatility.
Stock tokenization can also unlock more efficient lending and borrowing through decentralized finance (DeFi), Yuminaga added. Tokenized shares could be used as collateral in lending markets, increasing capital efficiency and enabling new financing opportunities, he said.
Giants like Nasdaq and NYSE entering the tokenized stock game could also solve one of today’s biggest problems: liquidity.
“Tokenized stocks have struggled with liquidity because traditional markets and on-chain markets are separate,” Yuminaga said. “If Nasdaq connects these two liquidity pools, it could change the equation.”
