Mark Greenberg, Chief Commercial Officer at Payward, explains Payward's brand portfolio expansion and vertical integration into banking and services. He argues that xStocks and permissionless tokenized equities solve broken traditional equity rails by enabling 24/7 trading, self-custody, and portability. He highlights the Nasdaq equity token partnership with BNY Mellon as the next infrastructure catalyst and says Payward will expand tokenization to more asset classes after learning from live equity products.
- Payward is transitioning from a Kraken-only brand into a broader portfolio including NinjaTrader, CF Benchmarks, and Reap.
- Payward Services and Payward Banking are being built to vertically integrate lending, yield, trading, advice, and asset management.
- xStocks tokenized equities are live, trade 24/7, can be used as collateral, self-custodied, and moved across platforms.
- Traditional equity transfers remain slow and still involve faxes; tokenized equities aim to fix that infrastructure problem.
- Payward has done $35-40 billion of xStocks volume but sees it as a tiny sliver of the total equity market.
- The Nasdaq equity token partnership with Nasdaq and BNY Mellon is intended to create permissioned equity infrastructure and fungibility with xStocks.
- Mark expects tokenization to expand into more asset classes beyond equities over the next few months.