The second half of the nine sections of the exchange public chain: Is what Kraken is supplementing not the chain, but the market?

Preface

"The bottom of the ninth," the most breathless moment in a baseball game.

The usual tactical probing has long ended, and the defenses on the field are tighter than ever. For the batter holding the bat at this moment, this is no longer a trial-and-error phase where mistakes are allowed; every swing must aim directly for a home run in this life-and-death showdown.

Putting this term in the context of today's exchange public chain track is not only appropriate but even carries a sense of cruel relevance.

Where is the exchange public chain now?

If we rewind time two or three years, exchanges creating chains was still a novelty.

Back then, the market looked at exchange public chains primarily through the lens of traffic. Whoever could bring users onto the chain faster, whoever could capture the hottest assets and speculative sentiment, would have a better chance of succeeding. Later, regulations changed, brands changed, and user structures changed. The market's expectations for exchange public chains also shifted: it was no longer just about speed or cost, but whether it could genuinely migrate a portion of users onto the chain using the exchange's original entry points, distribution, and credibility.

Today, the story of exchange public chains has been told many times. Look at the early examples: Coinbase's Base chain earned over $75 million in Sequencer Revenue in 2025, capturing nearly 60% of the profits in the entire L2 sequencer market.

Data source: Blockworks

So when we say "the bottom of the ninth," it's not just for the sake of a catchy phrase; it's because this track indeed needs to change the questions being asked. In previous rounds, the competition was about who could build a chain and attract traffic. Now, simply "building another chain" is no longer valuable. What truly begins to create a gap is whether a chain can organize assets, trading, liquidity, and capital efficiency into a market after it is launched.

In other words, the first half of the exchange public chain competition was about building chains, while the second half is about building markets.

Why revisit Ink now?

From this stage, Ink has just begun to become worth revisiting.

On the surface, Ink can easily be categorized as a standard exchange-based L2. Backed by Kraken, its technical route follows the Ethereum Layer 2 and Superchain narrative, with points, DeFi, and trading scenarios on-chain, naturally inviting comparisons with samples like Base and BSC.

But if it's merely understood as "Kraken has also launched a chain," then that perspective is fundamentally skewed. The data provides the most intuitive feedback: since its low-key launch at the end of 2024, Ink's TVL skyrocketed from $7 million to a peak of $600 million at the beginning of this year, becoming one of the fastest-growing networks in the entire Superchain ecosystem.

Data source: DefiLlama

For Kraken, Ink is not just a simple brand extension. It is more like Kraken's first attempt to extract its most valuable offline capabilities and reorganize them on-chain: asset entry, trading capabilities, user trust, liquidity organization, and the capital efficiency surrounding trading.

The market is not lacking chains, nor is it lacking chains that can issue points. What is truly scarce is a chain that enters the market from the very beginning with a mature trading platform's asset entry, over 10 million professional users, risk control experience, and brand credibility. Many projects have chains first and then add applications. Kraken's path this time is reversed. It first asks not "how should the chain be launched," but "which of the most valuable capabilities in the exchange are worth moving to the chain, and can a larger market be formed after moving?"

Why is RWA important here?

From this perspective, it is easier to understand why RWA appears in Ink's narrative but cannot be the sole protagonist.

In the past two years, the market has told too many stories about "assets going on-chain." U.S. Treasury bonds have gone on-chain, fund shares have gone on-chain. But the problem remains unchanged: putting assets on-chain does not equate to forming a market. Many RWA projects address issuance issues, not market issues. Tokenizing assets is just the first step. What truly determines whether they can become on-chain financial assets is whether there are people trading them after they are on-chain and whether there is sufficient liquidity.

If none of these exist, then RWA ultimately becomes just static assets on-chain, not financial assets on-chain. What Kraken is focused on is clearly not just "adding a few more types of assets." What it wants to supplement is the most lacking layer after assets go on-chain: the market.

At this point, the underlying logic of layouts like xStocks and Franklin Templeton becomes clear.

Background data shows:

The tokenized stock framework xStocks launched by Kraken's parent company Payward has accumulated a trading volume exceeding $30 billion. Recently, Kraken reached a strategic cooperation with traditional financial giant Franklin Templeton, which manages trillions in assets, planning to deeply integrate the latter's global tokenized money market fund BENJI into the Kraken platform and Ink ecosystem.

This signal means: Kraken wants this chain to carry not just the crypto-native narrative but also to leverage the transfer of tens of billions in traditional assets to capture higher quality institutional credit.

But having assets alone is not enough.

Nado is not just another DEX

Kraken's most valuable aspect has never been how many assets it can list, but how well it understands how markets are formed. No matter how good the assets are, if there is no real trading and no sustained liquidity, it is difficult to turn them into a true financial market. This also explains why Nado, the core derivatives protocol in the Ink ecosystem, cannot be simply labeled as "just another DEX."

Nado is far from an ordinary AMM Swap; its underlying technology comes from Kraken's targeted cleaning and complete acquisition of the core team and technology of the well-known derivatives protocol Vertex Protocol. As an on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) DEX deeply incubated by an exchange, Nado perfectly translates the core asset efficiency of CEX:

• Relying on a 200ms block time, it achieves extreme execution speeds of 5ms - 15ms at CEX level;

• Introduced a unified margin approach and an on-chain risk control engine.

In the recently concluded Private Alpha phase and the first season, Nado achieved over $48 billion in cumulative trading volume in less than half a year, generating over $11 million in protocol fee revenue, with perpetual contract trading volume once exceeding $17 billion in a single month.

Data source: DefiLlama

With Nado officially canceling its invitation system and fully opening its second season on May 21, its points pool size is directly linked to platform trading volume, and it announced that it will gradually support using RWA assets (such as Treasury bonds, tokenized stocks) directly as trading margins.

The recent advancement of xStocks has pushed this clue forward another step. Tokenized U.S. stocks are no longer just holdings on-chain but can now be used as trading margins by Nado. Users can maintain exposure to U.S. stocks like SPYx and QQQx while also participating in other market trades with the same assets.

The improvement in capital efficiency comes from here: the same asset no longer serves just one market but can be reused across multiple trading scenarios.

This is the truly noteworthy aspect of the 24/7 RWA market: it is not about assets "staying on-chain" all the time, but about their continuous participation in trading, collateralization, pricing, and risk expression. Once RWA transforms from static assets into callable capital, what Ink wants to convey is not just about assets going on-chain, but about assets, trading, and capital efficiency beginning to close in the same on-chain environment.

Once RWA can truly be continuously called as trading margins, Ink's positioning will be completely different.

It will no longer just be a chain that allows assets to "stay on it," but an environment where assets begin to flow, price, collateralize, and earn returns. Coupled with Tydro, another core lending layer incubated by Aave v3 on the Ink chain, Ink truly connects the capital efficiency closed loop of "trading-lending-re-collateralization."

How should Ink be understood?

Kraken is not starting from scratch to create a story. It already has users, trading venues, understands risks, and has been managing liquidity. The value of Ink is to provide Kraken with an on-chain execution environment, allowing it to gradually overflow the things originally completed in the exchange onto the chain.

This is also why points in Ink are not entirely the same as ordinary airdrop projects. If points are just for short-term TVL boosts, then they are not particularly remarkable. But if the role of points is to gradually embed user behavior, capital retention, and trading habits into the on-chain environment led by Kraken, then it is not just a marketing move but more like Kraken is conducting an early cold start for this on-chain financial structure.

So, how should Ink truly be understood?

• It is not "Kraken also made a chain."

• It is not "just another pure RWA concept project."

• It is certainly not "the next place just to chase airdrops."

A more accurate statement is: Kraken is trying to put its strongest capabilities—asset entry, trading ability, and capital efficiency—into the same on-chain environment. Ink is this environment, Nado is the execution layer, Tydro is the liquidity layer, and RWA is the asset direction that can most easily amplify this structure.

xStocks and Franklin Templeton supplement the asset side; Nado supplements the trading side; Ink handles settlement, retention, and on-chain sequencer revenue; and Kraken itself provides the credit, users, and market organization capabilities behind all of this.

This is why, in the second half of the exchange public chain, Kraken deserves to be looked at separately again. Other exchanges also have chains, DeFi, and points; but what Ink's structure truly wants to prove is not "I have it too," but "can I really create a trillion-dollar compliant financial market on-chain?"

For ordinary retail investors and research institutions, in the upcoming bottom of the ninth, the truly noteworthy indicators are only a few specific metrics:

1. Changes in asset structure: Can the RWA assets introduced by Kraken (such as BENJI) truly be converted into underlying margins for protocols like Nado in the second season, achieving secondary liquidity for assets?

2. Real retention of trading flow: After Nado opens public testing and launches trading competitions, can its daily active users and trading volume break free from dependence on $INK airdrop expectations and establish the stickiness of professional traders?

3. Capital retention rate: Is the nearly $200 million in funds on Tydro waiting for an airdrop snapshot, or is it beginning to derive more stable collateralization, yield generation, and on-chain secondary utilization?

Because ultimately, whether Ink is worth re-evaluating does not hinge on how similar it is to any L2, but on whether Kraken can truly use it to stitch together assets, trading, and capital efficiency into a genuinely liquid financial market.