Bitcoin Magazine

Nasdaq Invests $100M in Kraken Parent Company: Report 

Nasdaq Inc. is investing $100 million in crypto exchange Kraken’s parent company, Payward, according to reports. 

The deal — not yet announced by either party — will help build out structure for tokenized stocks, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal values the crypto company at $21 billion, according to the report. 

It comes as Wall Street increasingly eyes up bitcoin and crypto-related infrastructure. Kraken has made deals this year and last with traditional finance firms and the S&P Dow Jones Indices in March made a deal to debut a new derivative contract on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid. 

Bloomberg’s report said that Kraken will distribute Nasdaq’s tokenized stocks on its own platform, giving customers the ability to own Nasdaq-listed stocks in a tokenized form. 

Wall Street has been eying up crypto companies and their infrastructure particularly because its interested in tokenizing assets like stocks. 

In January, the New York Stock Exchange said it was building a platform allowing traders to buy and sell tokenized versions of US-listed equities and exchange-traded funds and settle those trades on the blockchain, 24/7.

Just last week, Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, and fintech company SoFi Technologies announced a deal to route SoFi customers’ crypto orders through Kraken’s institutional trading platform and list SoFi’s stablecoin on the exchange.

Under the agreement, SoFi will send its digital asset order flow to Kraken Prime, Kraken’s prime brokerage arm, which launched in 2025. 

Kraken — like other crypto exchanges — is pushing into the traditional finance world, allowing users to trade stocks, bonds and other assets. The company has sold its app as a “primary account for everything.”

This post Nasdaq Invests $100M in Kraken Parent Company: Report  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price May Be Battered, but Structural Adoption Story Still Intact: Grayscale

Bitcoin’s price has shown signs of stabilizing after a rough stretch, but even setting aside where prices go in the near term, asset manager Grayscale says adoption of the cryptocurrency over the medium and long run remains largely unchanged.

The reason: continued, unsustainable growth in government debt as a factor that keeps inflation and currency-debasement risk elevated. 

That backdrop, Grayscale argues, could push a widening range of investors toward scarce assets and alternative stores of value — a category where Bitcoin, with its fixed supply, is increasingly well positioned as a candidate.

It added that the adoption of stablecoins and tokenization are set to make blockchain infrastructure commonplace across financial services. Top banks and asset managers have piled into the tokenization space the past year and are fast adopting crypto technology. 

Grayscale argues that as that spreads, more banks, brokerages, and other intermediaries will have both the technical rails and regulatory clarity needed to hold and transact in Bitcoin — eroding the wall that has historically kept it structurally separate from mainstream finance.

“As the spread of the technology continues, many more intermediaries will have the necessary infrastructure (and regulatory clarity) to transact and store balances in Bitcoin — it will no longer be structurally apart from the rest of the financial system,” the note by the firm’s head of research, Zach Pandl, reads.

The firm added that younger investors show a markedly higher appetite for digital assets, and alternative investments have become a standard portfolio component rather than a fringe allocation. 

The analysis expects institutions, wealth platforms, and individual investors alike to keep folding Bitcoin into diversified portfolios — largely through exchange-traded products, a shift it describes as already well underway.

Taken together, the report says that a cyclical downturn in price doesn’t undercut the longer-term adoption thesis. 

The Bitcoin price was recently $63,549, down close to 50% from its October record of $126,080. 

This post Bitcoin Price May Be Battered, but Structural Adoption Story Still Intact: Grayscale first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.