Kraken Launches Tokenized Equity Perpetual Futures With 20x Leverage

Kraken just gave non-US traders a way to bet on a stock’s price with 20 times leverage, without ever touching a traditional brokerage account.

Kraken has launched tokenized equity perpetual futures for clients outside the United States, offering leveraged exposure of up to 20x on tokenized versions of traditional stocks. The product combines two distinct financial instruments — tokenized equities and perpetual futures contracts — into a single offering available exclusively to Kraken’s non-US client base, reflecting the more restrictive US regulatory environment around both leveraged derivatives and tokenized securities.

What exactly is a perpetual futures contract, and why pair it with tokenized stocks specifically? A perpetual future is a derivatives contract with no expiration date that tracks an underlying asset’s price, typically using a funding rate mechanism to keep the contract price aligned with the spot market — applying that same structure to tokenized equities lets traders speculate on stock price movements with leverage, in a format crypto-native traders are already broadly familiar with from Bitcoin and Ethereum perpetuals.

Why is this restricted to non-US clients? US securities and derivatives regulations impose substantially stricter rules around leveraged trading products and equity derivatives than many other jurisdictions, making a product like 20x leveraged tokenized equity futures far more complex to legally offer to US-based users without extensive additional registration and compliance work.

The launch places Kraken alongside Coinbase and Binance in an accelerating race among major exchanges to build out tokenized real-world asset products, each taking a somewhat different approach — Coinbase linking directly to traditional market data platforms, Binance partnering with Ondo Finance, and Kraken leaning into the leveraged derivatives angle it already has deep expertise in.

High leverage products carry substantial risk regardless of the underlying asset — a 20x leveraged position can be liquidated by a relatively small adverse price move, and that risk profile applies just as directly to tokenized equity futures as it does to any other leveraged crypto derivative.

Want to understand how leverage and liquidation actually work in perpetual futures trading? Learn more in the Bitcoin Academy.