Good afternoon everyone. My name is Gareth Jeninson. For those of you that don't know me, I've been in the industry for quite a long time since 2017. I was with Cointelegraph for five or six years and I've recently joined The Block. It's a great pleasure to be in conversation with Arjun from Kraken today. It's been an interesting couple of weeks news-wise for you guys. Backstage you kind of said to me, ask me anything and everything. I think the MoneyGram news that came out today is the most top of mind, but you also have the acquisition of Bitnomial. For everyone out there, can you give us a kind of TL;DR behind these deals?
Yeah, so thanks for having me. Look, if you take a look at the overall ecosystem over the last 10 years, we went from BTC to ETH to other layer 1s, layer 2s including Solana. And a lot of the innovation has been around what's the type of collateral that we're going to have moving forward that we can get access to or trade or speculate or save, store, etc. And real-world assets has become a larger part of that. So if you take a look at the DeFi ecosystem including Hyperliquid and you see what's being traded, it's silver, it's gold, it's oil, etc. So a part of our whole goal has been multi-product, multi-asset across Payward's products and services including Kraken. And so our focus has been how do we enumerate more of those products not just rest of world but within the United States and in Europe. And so part of the Bitnomial acquisition, it's not like a secret, is that we're going to do crypto perps, then equity perps and other types of assets.
What's the timeline on that? Can you say?
Well, I'm hoping that we can just continue to push any of this, what I call, permissionless innovation through the regulated stack as soon as possible. So I'm hoping, you know, sometime this year.
Let's talk about xStocks. It's been about a year. You guys launched in June 2025. Very, very impressive numbers in terms of actual trading activity. In your mind, what's the last year been like? Are you quite happy with where you're at right now? Before we dig into the meat of it.
I think you have market cyclicality up and down, right? Depending on the type of assets people want access to. And so am I happy at any given time? The answer is no because we want to grow as fast as possible. But I think what's more important is where's the demand coming from? What are the assets? Are they trading? Do they want to save? Do they want to borrow? Do they want to lend? How do you do that in a safe way for all of our customers? And given the environment, I think you're just seeing more and more of that, frankly, in new developing economies rather than developed economies. And then the inverse happens when it comes to speculation. So they kind of converge together at the same time. That's what I call a perfect storm. You don't always see that. And I think when you look at that market cyclicality, that's what you want to be able to see.
What's the barrier in your mind? Correct me if I'm wrong, but US users right now can't trade xStocks on the platform. How do you address that? What's the actual barrier there? And is that going to be the big unlock in terms of really a huge amount of trading activity?
Yeah. So similar to what we've done in Europe and the rest of the world is that we worked with the regulators to come out with a framework around what it means to be able to get access to tokenized equities. And I think these types of products take longer than currencies, right? Like when you think about USDT, USDC, it's a form factor that's easy to be able to use because it makes sense and you can price your goods and services on that. So fast proliferation, but the next thing you do is how do you save assets? How do you store it? How do you think about the future of what compounding could look like? And we use these terms but for someone who's a small to medium business it's just a different framework. And so equities becomes a large part of that. But like what do they want access to? They want access to Nvidia, they want access to Tesla, they want access to McDonald's. It's a lot of these names that they think of as safe — it may or may not be — but they think of it as safe compounding businesses and so they want access to that. So that's where most of the demand has been and so we focused on the top 50, now we moved to the top 100, and then later on this year we'll be able to get the equities available, including ETFs, for constituents worldwide.
Every time we launch a new asset on any of the platforms that we partner with on the xStocks initiative, you just see this massive demand pop up because they're looking for it now more than ever. So we've probably grown more over the last three months than we did in the first year. When it comes to xStocks and tokenized equities, especially on-chain, there's a lot of competition.
Two weeks ago I was at Paris Blockchain Week and had a really fascinating conversation with Ben Zhou, who's the CEO of Bybit, and I kind of put it to him as well — like how does this play out? In my mind, most cryptocurrency exchanges will become venues where people are able to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, a wide variety of cryptocurrencies and then tokenized equities. What differentiates who wins, and do you think it is a winner-take-all type situation?
Yeah, you know, the answer to all of this is pretty simple. In order to have movement or people think about what they want to do with that collateral is the ability to borrow against it, lend against it, and get a yield on top of it, right? Like what else can you do with the asset besides hold it? And that's been basically the biggest problem with any of these real-world assets is like, well, what do you do with it when you have access to it or it sits on your coffers? And so a lot of the initiatives we push ourselves and with other partners is: great, well you can trade it out just like spot, but can you lend against it? Can you borrow against it? Can you margin against it? Can you get leverage against it? And can you do that in a permissionless way? And I think this is where you have a lot of conversations around this tokenized permissioned world, which is what you see in these regulated markets. It's the same thing as when people used to say, 'Let me build like an on-prem version in the cloud.' Like that message doesn't make any sense. And so in order for people to build and innovate products and services on top of real-world assets, it has to be permissionless.
Yeah. When it comes to being permissionless, do you think it's a no-brainer that this should be happening on platforms like Kraken and all the other main exchanges? And if you look at some of your competitors in the space, what — have they been able to move a bit faster than you and what would be the reason for that?
I think if you take a look at the overall ecosystem, if you just take a look at raw numbers and where assets are sitting, it's either very concentrated — there's the speculation of what that really means, like who's really buying that — or it's much more proliferated and evenly distributed. If you take a look at most of what we've been able to do, not just with us, but with Bybit, with BNB, with Tron recently, it's proliferating at a faster pace with independent holders. Then those independent holders are only holding a couple thousand bucks, which I think is quite exciting and performative in its own view. But these things take time. It's not like you're going to see this massive step up. And so in eight years when we're talking about this, we're going to be talking about real-world assets hitting a trillion plus. Today they're in the multiple billions. So it's very small in the overall ecosystem, even within crypto, given that crypto's grown up over the last 15 years. So in order to get there, you're just going to have multiple use cases. And I go back to what I said before, which is how do you borrow against it? How do you lend against it? And how do you actually get money movement on top of that asset?
