Deutsche Börse accelerates hybrid market buildout

Deutsche Börse’s digital‑assets team is actively building a bridge between traditional trading infrastructure and blockchain‑native representations of real assets. On Feb. 9, 2026, its 360T venue integrated a Kraken‑backed tokenized equities product (xStocks), allowing institutional clients to access tokenized versions of large‑cap shares through a regulated execution point.

This technical integration is meaningful because it demonstrates one practical path for custodial services, clearing utilities and trading venues to operate alongside distributed ledgers rather than being bypassed by purely off‑exchange models. Market data and industry tallies now put on‑chain tokenized equities close to $963 million by January 2026, after an extremely rapid year‑over‑year rise, while broader tokenized RWA inventories are estimated in the low tens of billions — signals that institutional participants are testing balance‑sheet allocations to ledgered instruments.

Regulatory developments have nudged that institutional shift. Recent clarifications — notably from U.S. regulators delineating issuer‑originated tokens from third‑party models and Europe’s staged MiCA and pilot regimes — have made custody‑integrated issuance and exchange‑led pilots more operationally viable. Parallel market utilities, including DTCC experiments with ledgered settlement, and public issuer experiments have provided technical and legal pilots for reconciling on‑chain records with conventional ownership frameworks.

Why governance matters: Deutsche Börse argues that regulated market operators can preserve investor protections, surveillance and risk controls while facilitating new liquidity pathways. Executives framed the work as embedding regulatory parity and clear counterparty integrity into token lifecycles, a position that appeals to asset managers and custodians wary of custody, settlement finality and insolvency risks in third‑party token models.

Technical and market cautions remain: throughput, predictable latency and transaction‑ordering risks limit how reliably public base layers support professional market‑making today. Those gaps are driving investment in middleware, sequencers, MPC custody and private execution rails, which can reintroduce centralized ordering advantages and concentrate fee capture among a short list of providers.

Operational scrutiny also targets asset backing for commodity‑linked tokens and certain stablecoins, prompting calls for clearer disclosure, auditing and custody guarantees before institutional flows scale. Industry participants are urging EU lawmakers to extend pilot frameworks and harmonize cross‑border rules to prevent fragmentation that would fragment liquidity and raise compliance costs.

Near‑term implications: expect more hybrid product launches from regulated venues, deeper cooperation between incumbent custodians and token issuers, and a tendency for liquidity to concentrate in jurisdictions and platforms that offer legal clarity, stablecoin liquidity and strong custody provenance. If regulators and market utilities coordinate on atomic delivery‑versus‑payment, custody interoperability and surveillance tooling, tokenized assets could convert pilot momentum into sustainable, tradable markets; absent that coordination, activity risks clustering on a few platforms and rails.

• Platform action: 360T live integration with Kraken‑backed tokenized equity listings.
• Market movement: on‑chain tokenized equities approaching $963M by Jan. 2026 amid very steep Y/Y gains.
• Regulatory ask: industry calls to broaden and operationalize EU pilot regimes and align cross‑border rules to sustain institutional uptake.