Kraken just flipped a switch. Eligible users outside the US can now use tokenized stocks and ETFs as collateral for futures and margin trading — no need to sell your holdings first.
The feature covers 10 assets to start: Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Strategy (MicroStrategy), the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, and the Invesco QQQ Trust among them. Each gets a haircut based on risk. Broad-market ETFs? Only 10% off. Volatile names like Strategy and Robinhood get hit with a 30% discount.
There are caps too. ETFs top out at $1 million in collateral value. Most individual stocks max at $250,000. Tokenized gold and Circle shares sit at $100,000. Kraken says it’ll review both haircuts and limits periodically.
The move lands a week after Kraken partnered with Maple to launch an onchain warehouse facility for institutional lending. Tokenized real-world assets are growing fast — RWA.xyz pegs the sector at roughly $32.6 billion, with tokenized stocks alone climbing from $381 million to $2 billion over the past year.
Franklin Templeton and Binance did something similar in February, letting institutions use tokenized money market fund shares as trading collateral. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund works the same way on Binance, Crypto.com, and Deribit.
Kraken’s feature is live now for EEA futures clients and in other eligible non-US jurisdictions for margin trading.
