- Kraken opened trading in more than 7,000 US-listed stocks across the European Economic Area.
- The equities business runs through a Cyprus-licensed entity under MiFID II rules.
- Users can hold the same company as a custodied share and as a wallet-transferable token.
- Bitpanda, Robinhood and Crypto.com already compete for the same European retail account.
Kraken switched on traditional US equity trading for customers across the European Economic Area on August 18, 2026, opening access to more than 7,000 US-listed stocks next to the 600-plus crypto assets and 700-plus tokenized xStocks already on the platform. The service runs through Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) Limited, Kraken’s Cyprus-based investment firm licensed by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission, under a MiFID II authorization that passports the offering into every EEA member state. Trading is live on Kraken Pro across web and mobile and on the standard retail app, with equity commissions waived for eligible users, though currency conversion costs and market spreads still apply.
Germany, France and the Netherlands got contained pilots first. Spain, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Austria, Portugal and Norway are among the markets added in this final phase.
One company, two versions, same account
Plenty of platforms sell Europeans exposure to Apple or Nvidia. What separates this launch is that a Kraken customer can now hold the actual share and its tokenized counterpart without moving capital between products or providers. That reads like a plumbing detail. It is closer to a bet on which format eventually wins.
xStocks arrived in mid-2025 through a partnership with the tokenization protocol Backed Finance, collateralized one-to-one against the underlying equities. The two formats diverge well before a trade ever settles.
Mark Greenberg, Chief Commercial Officer at Payward, described the launch as removing what he called the artificial divide between traditional and tokenized formats of the same asset. The commercial logic behind the phrasing is plain enough. A customer who can move between a custodied share and a wallet-held token without leaving the app has one less reason to open an account somewhere else.
The licence did the heavy lifting
A crypto exchange cannot simply bolt equities onto its order book. Listing traditional shares drags the operator into the same regulatory perimeter as any European broker, which is why the business sits inside Payward Europe Digital Solutions (CY) rather than the entity handling crypto. MiFID II authorization carries obligations that crypto trading in Europe never imposed: appropriateness assessments, best execution duties, client asset segregation, detailed reporting to the national supervisor.
Users meet that at signup. European clients face multi-step onboarding covering identity documentation, a financial knowledge questionnaire and tax eligibility verification before equity trading unlocks. The questionnaire is not a formality – under MiFID II a firm has to establish that a retail client understands the instrument in front of them, and a failed assessment can restrict access.
Cyprus is a deliberate choice. CySEC-licensed investment firms passport their authorization across the entire EEA, so one supervisory relationship replaces thirty. Kraken is neither the first nor the last crypto operator to route European brokerage through Limassol.
Where xStocks actually sits in the tokenized market
Kraken puts cumulative transaction volume through xStocks above $38 billion since the June 2025 launch. On market capitalization, Token Terminal data as of August 17 placed xStocks second among tokenized stock issuers, behind Ondo Finance and ahead of Binance’s bStocks, though trackers label these differently – the tokens are issued by Backed Finance, with Kraken acting as distribution partner, and some datasets report the position under the issuer name instead.
Europe gets what the SEC will not clear
American retail investors cannot buy tokenized equities through a domestic exchange. The SEC’s position on securities issuance, transfer agent requirements and settlement finality leaves no clean route for a US platform to hand a retail client a wallet-transferable share certificate. Europe wrote different rules. MiCA covers crypto-asset services, MiFID II covers securities, and the boundary between them is defined well enough that a firm can build across both without waiting for a no-action letter.
That gap explains why so much cross-asset infrastructure gets tested on European users first. Crypto.com opened tokenized stock trading to EEA customers on August 12, 2026 with roughly 1,500 assets, six days ahead of Kraken. Binance runs bStocks. Coinbase offers integrated equities at home but leans on equity-linked perpetual futures and on-chain tooling for its international base.
Bitpanda beats Kraken on raw instrument count. Robinhood reached the tokenized market earlier. Kraken’s claim is narrower and harder to copy at speed: no other platform in the region fuses a regulated brokerage account with certificates a customer can withdraw to a wallet.
Stocks are the retention play, not the revenue
For a European retail investor the immediate effect is one fewer account to maintain. Funding, portfolio reporting and tax documentation consolidate. The trade-off is concentration, and anyone who lived through 2022 understands what a single-venue balance means when the venue fails.
Kraken earns almost nothing on commission-free equities, with conversion spreads doing the modest work. The value sits in what a stock portfolio does to churn. Crypto balances leave quickly. Equity positions held for years do not, and that changes how a business gets valued. The pattern repeats across jurisdictions – in July the exchange launched CFTC-regulated perpetual futures for eligible US clients through Bitnomial, the Chicago derivatives venue its parent acquired earlier in the year, giving American traders spot, margin, CME futures and perpetuals inside one collateral pool.
Payward reported $508 million in Q2 revenue, up 17% year-over-year, against a backdrop of widely reported listing preparations. A brokerage arm holding sticky retail assets reads very differently to prospective public investors than a revenue line that tracks Bitcoin volatility.
Settlement remains the open question. Tokenized equities depend on issuers such as Backed Finance holding the underlying shares and honoring redemptions, which quietly reintroduces the counterparty exposure that on-chain finance claims to remove. Supervisors across the EEA have begun examining that structure, and any guidance on collateral verification or redemption obligations would land directly on the product Kraken has built its differentiation around.