If you love Apple and you love crypto, good news: cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is preparing to let users trade tokenized versions of popular stocks like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia. Except if you’re in the U.S., that is.

According to an exclusive report by the WSJ, Kraken’s new product, called xStocks, will first be made available to customers in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, with a broader rollout planned in the coming weeks.

As the WSJ explains:

Kraken refers to its new breed of tokens with the brand name “xStocks.” They will be deployed on the Solana blockchain platform. (…) Behind the scenes, xStocks tokens will be backed by shares of the underlying security, with Kraken’s partner company Backed Finance acquiring new shares as needed, the companies say. The tokens are to be redeemable for the cash value of the underlying securities. In theory, that should keep the tokens’ prices in line with the prices of the corresponding stocks and ETFs.

In practice, this means xStocks will behave more like stablecoins pegged to real-world assets than like actual shares. This will let users speculate on the price of Apple or Tesla without owning any voting rights or receiving dividends.

Among the ETFs Kraken plans to tokenize are the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY) and SPDR Gold Shares, two of the most widely held index funds in the world.

Kraken’s pitch is simple: international access to U.S. markets is still clunky, expensive, and slow. “There’s a lot of friction,” Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi told the WSJ. xStocks aim to fix that by offering instant settlement and around-the-clock global availability.

In effect, this could be the first step toward putting U.S. stocks on the internet in a truly native way, making assets like Apple or Tesla tradable 24/7, even when Wall Street is asleep.

“But didn’t Binance already try this?” Yes. And it didn’t end well.

Binance briefly offered tokenized stocks like Tesla back in 2021, but shut them down months later after facing regulatory pressure. To avoid this scenario, Kraken says it’s working with regulators in each region.

And the landscape has shifted. Tokenization is no longer just crypto hype. It’s slowly creeping into the financial mainstream. Apple stock on a blockchain might sound like a niche experiment today, but if companies like Kraken play this right, this could really be the beginning of a new way for global investors to access U.S. assets.