Kraken Parent Payward Partners Ledger to Store Stocks in Cold Wallets

Investors can now buy tokenized versions of popular stocks and store them offline on a physical device, under a partnership announced Thursday between hardware wallet maker Ledger and Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken.

The arrangement harks back, in a sense, to the era when people kept paper stock certificates in a safe. Cold storage—holding digital assets on a device disconnected from the internet—has long been the practice of hardcore Bitcoin devotees who refuse to entrust their holdings to a third party or leave them online where hackers can reach them.

Until now, stocks have had no cold-storage equivalent. Paper certificates still exist in theory, but the request process is complicated and the fees steep. That scarcity leaves an open question: how many investors will actually want to hold equities on a physical device at a time when online brokerages process trillions of dollars in daily transactions with few incidents.

Sebastien Badault, the Ledger executive leading the Payward tie-up, argues the math changes with tokenized stocks. The asset class took off last year and just received an "innovation exemption" from the SEC. He sees two customer pools.

The first is Ledger's existing base—roughly 8 million retail and institutional customers who already prefer self-custody over third-party reliance. The second, Badault says, consists of more traditional stock buyers who are growing uneasy about hackers in an age of AI and quantum computing.

The integration runs both ways, Badault explained. A customer using Payward's stock-buying platform, xStocks, can require a signature on their Ledger device as a final security check before completing a transaction. Ledger devices, which offer a trading platform alongside simple custody, will now include an xStocks integration.

For now, Ledger hardware—including its flagship Stax model, designed by former Apple designer Tony Fadell—will only support Payward's version of tokenized stocks. Badault said the company is in talks with Coinbase, Binance and Robinhood, all of which have rolled out tokenized stocks of their own in recent months.

The timing cuts both ways. Tokenized stocks have gained traction primarily overseas and still represent a tiny fraction of the broader stock market. Separately, a recent security incident involving a little-known hardware wallet maker has stirred debate over whether self-custody is viable even for crypto devotees.

Badault counters that Ledger's user-friendly design, combined with the broader push toward tokenization, will lead more individuals and institutions to store assets of all kinds on secure offline devices in coming years.

Payward co-CEO David Ripley framed the deal in strategic terms. "By partnering with Ledger, we're building where the industry is heading: a future where secure self-custody and global financial infrastructure work hand in hand to provide powerful and seamless trading experiences," Ripley said in a statement.

If Ledger closes integrations with Coinbase, Binance and Robinhood, cold-stored equities would move beyond a single-exchange niche—and test whether self-custody can scale from Bitcoin holders to mainstream stock investors.