Payward, the parent of the Kraken crypto exchange and owner of xStocks, has announced the launch of its IPO platform enabling access to stocks at the IPO price (rather than the secondary market price) to foreign retail investors. xStocks offers tokenized stocks which are structured loan notes, backed 1:1 by stocks held in custody. While token holders do not own the stock itself, they get full exposure to the price movements.
IPO stocks are being made available to foreign investors, which is the big win. But xStocks are not allowed to be traded in the United States. US Kraken customers instead get access to conventional stocks via broker dealers Alpaca and ClickIPO through Kraken Securities.
The launch is just in time for the SpaceX IPO, which is reportedly targeting 12 June for the listing. The only question is whether there’s sufficient time for SpaceX, as investors will still need to express interest. Payward said it will “aggregate demand and work with an underwriting syndicate on behalf of all xStocks Alliance partners,” referring to the dozen or so other exchanges that trade xStocks.
Payward knows that Elon Musk stocks are hugely popular with its audience. xStocks trade on both decentralized exchanges and centralized ones like Kraken. Last month TSLAx was the most traded xStock on Kraken, making up 15.4% in dollar value of all xStocks traded on the exchange, and 12.5% of transaction volumes. So the demand for SpaceX stock is likely to be significant.
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