Kraken Now Lets You HODL Apple and Nvidia While Betting Against Them 🍎📈

Crypto exchange Kraken has begun accepting select tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds as collateral for futures and margin trading, enabling eligible users outside the United States to open leveraged positions without liquidating their holdings. The rollout covers 10 tokenized stocks and ETFs, including Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Strategy, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF and the Invesco QQQ Trust. Each asset carries a risk-based collateral haircut and a cap on eligible collateral value, with both parameters subject to periodic review.

Broad-market ETFs receive the lowest haircut at 10%, while more volatile names such as Strategy and Robinhood are discounted by 30%. Collateral caps range up to $1 million for broad-market ETFs, up to $250,000 for most individual stocks, and up to $100,000 for tokenized gold and Circle shares. Kraken said tokenized stocks can be used as futures collateral in the European Economic Area, while margin collateral support is offered in other eligible jurisdictions outside the bloc.

The launch follows Kraken's recent partnership with Maple to establish an onchain warehouse financing facility for institutional crypto lending, aimed at expanding the exchange's credit business through blockchain-based structured products. Together, the initiatives extend the role of onchain assets across both retail and institutional trading infrastructure.

Tokenized assets have moved further into mainstream financial plumbing. In February, Franklin Templeton and Binance launched a program allowing institutions to post tokenized money market fund shares as trading collateral while the underlying assets remained in regulated off-exchange custody. BlackRock's tokenized US Treasury fund, BUIDL, is accepted as trading collateral on Binance, Crypto.com and Deribit. Earlier this week, Tradeweb executed what it described as the first real-time purchase and sale of a tokenized US Treasury settled against tokenized cash on the Canton Network.

According to data from RWA.xyz, the tokenized real-world asset sector has grown to roughly $32.6 billion in distributed value, while tokenized stocks have climbed to about $2 billion from roughly $381 million a year earlier.