- Payward’s xStocks has deployed tokens tracking more than 200 UK and EU-listed companies, its first move beyond US shares, taking the range past 1,500 assets.
- They trade on Kraken and on chains including Solana and Ethereum, across more than 110 markets. The UK is not one of them.
- The $45bn of volume and 550,000 holders quoted in the release are platform-wide totals built mostly on US listings, not figures for this launch.
Shares in more than 200 of the largest listed companies in Britain and the European Union now exist as tokens on public . The firm behind them is Payward, parent of Kraken. The one group that cannot buy them is investors in the UK.
This is being written up as UK and European stock markets opening to crypto holders. If you are reading this from Britain, it has not opened to you, and the announcement says so in its own distribution notes.
The second thing worth knowing applies wherever you live. A tokenised share is a token backed by a share, not ownership of the company. You are holding an instrument issued by a Jersey company, whose value tracks the stock price, and your claim is against that issuer rather than against Shell or SAP. Price risk is the familiar part. Issuer and custody risk are added on top.
What has actually been deployed
The first wave covers 200 or so of the most actively traded listings in the UK and EU, with more to be tokenised on a rolling basis. That takes xStocks past 1,500 tokenised assets in total across stocks, and IPOs. The tokens trade on Kraken and through partner platforms, and sit on Solana, Ethereum, TON, Ink, X Layer and other chains.
Payward describes the structure as backed 1:1, with a share bought and held at a regulated custodian for as long as the token trades. No independent attestation, audit or proof of reserves is cited, so the backing is something you take on the issuer’s word rather than something a reader can check.
Several outlets have listed specific constituents, including HSBC, LVMH, Rolls-Royce and Siemens. Those names do not appear in the press release itself and we could not confirm them against it.
Mark Greenberg, Payward’s chief commercial officer, said in the release: “Access to capital markets is still drawn on a map, and it still depends on holding the right passport.” He added that “over 200 UK and European listings today is proof it works.”
Deploying the tokens proves the plumbing runs. It does not show that anyone is trading these particular ones. The volume and holder figures in the same announcement are cumulative totals for the whole platform, accumulated largely on US stocks since launch, and nothing in the release breaks out demand for the new batch.
Why UK investors are shut out
The release states that xStocks remain unavailable to investors in the United Kingdom, and to US persons, without explaining why. The tokens are issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited in Jersey and offered through Payward Digital Solutions Ltd, licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, and the legal notes confirm they are not registered with any local securities regulator.
That is the practical obstacle. Offering an instrument that tracks a listed share to UK retail customers normally requires UK authorisation and an approved promotion behind it, and an offshore token sold under a Bermudan licence has neither. The FCA’s rules on marketing crypto products to consumers sit over the top of that.
For a UK reader the loss is fairly small in any case. You can already buy Shell or Siemens through an ordinary broker, in pounds, inside an ISA. The audience for a tokenised version of a London listing was never Londoners: it is investors in markets where a UK or EU brokerage account is hard to open at all.
A crowded few weeks for tokenised stocks
Payward is not the only one moving. OKX and ICE are pressing ahead with tokenised stocks on 23 November, testing a new SEC exemption, while Nasdaq works on its own plan and has warned that trading the same stock across multiple venues could fragment liquidity. Those efforts are trying to build inside the US regulatory perimeter. xStocks has grown by operating outside the major ones and selling access to everyone the perimeter excludes.
Which approach wins depends less on the technology than on where the trading volume settles, and neither camp has published numbers that answer it.
What to watch
Whether any trading data for the new UK and EU tokens appears. A fortnight of volume figures would tell you more than the launch did.
Then the two forward-looking items in the release. Hundreds of Hong Kong listings are promised “in the coming weeks”, and the London Stock Exchange “intends” to list xStocks on LSE 24 in 2027, subject to regulatory approval. The second of those is the one that would matter to a UK reader, because an LSE listing is the only version of this that could plausibly become available here. An intention is not an approval, and 2027 is a long way off.