Kraken opens Jersey Mike's IPO to 110 countries via tokenized shares. JMKEx trades 24/5 post-listing. The $1.87B tokenized equity market faces its next stress test after SpaceX's oversubscription issues.
Alpha Score of 64 reflects moderate overall profile with strong momentum, moderate value, moderate quality, moderate sentiment.
Kraken wants to let retail investors worldwide buy into a sandwich chain's Wall Street debut. The crypto exchange is offering both U.S. and international users a path into the Jersey Mike's IPO – either through direct share allocations or through JMKEx, a tokenized version of the stock backed 1:1 by actual shares.
U.S. customers can submit interest at the IPO price in book-entry form. International users in over 110 countries get access to JMKEx, with the backing shares held under regulated custody. Allocations aren't guaranteed – they're determined by the IPO underwriter, so there's no promise you'll actually get in. That's standard IPO territory, even if the wrapper is not.
Jersey Mike's is planning to list its Class A shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker JMKE. Pricing is set between $21 and $25 per share. The chain has over 3,300 locations across the U.S., so it's a real, large business heading to a traditional exchange, just with a crypto-native distribution layer sitting on top.
Post-IPO, JMKEx trades 24/5 on Kraken and other participating xStocks Alliance platforms. The underlying Jersey Mike's shares trade only during regular U.S. market hours. The tokenized version gets extended trading windows – one of the clearest practical advantages of wrapping equity in a digital asset format.
Kraken also lets tokenized shares move across xStocks Alliance platforms onchain and plug into decentralized finance applications. That means retail investors who don't have traditional brokerage accounts – or who live in countries where opening one is a hassle – can still get exposure to U.S. public equities. No Fidelity account required. Just a Kraken login and eligibility.
That's the pitch. Whether execution matches it is a separate question.
Jersey Mike's isn't the first tokenized IPO Kraken has run. SpaceX went through the same process back in June, and it didn't go perfectly. High demand led to oversubscription, and several platforms – Binance and Bybit among them – had to cancel their campaigns because they couldn't secure enough underlying shares. It's a real operational problem: when demand for the tokenized version outpaces available supply of the actual stock, the whole structure breaks down fast.
Kraken didn't escape the SpaceX chaos unscathed. The mechanics of sourcing shares through traditional IPO channels while simultaneously running a crypto-native distribution product is genuinely hard. Underwriters control allocations. Crypto exchanges don't have the same pull as Goldman or Morgan Stanley at the deal table. So the gap between what investors want and what platforms can actually deliver stays murky.
Demand is clearly there. The broader tokenized equities market has been moving fast. Per RWA.xyz data, the market's distributed value jumped from under $500 million in mid-2025 to around $1.87 billion. That's a 29.4% increase over the past month alone. It's a run for a market that barely registered two years ago.
The Jersey Mike's deal is a stress test for how far tokenized IPO infrastructure has come since SpaceX. Can Kraken handle the allocation process more cleanly this time? Can xStocks Alliance platforms absorb the trading volume once JMKEx goes live? Unclear yet.
What's not unclear is the direction of travel. Traditional equity markets and crypto platforms are colliding faster than most Wall Street firms expected. Exchanges like Kraken are pushing into territory that used to belong exclusively to licensed broker-dealers, and they're doing it by tokenizing the underlying assets rather than replicating the full regulatory stack.
The oversubscription problem during SpaceX probably won't be the last hiccup. There's still no clean solution to the supply constraint issue when a tokenized IPO blows up in popularity. Platforms can't print extra shares. Underwriters aren't going to hand over bigger allocations just because demand showed up through a crypto exchange.
Still, the $1.87 billion market figure is hard to ignore. That's real money chasing tokenized equity exposure, and it wasn't there 18 months ago. Jersey Mike's IPO, priced between $21 and $25 per share, lists on the NYSE under JMKE.
Jean-Luc Maracon is a French-Swiss expert in decentralized finance, known for his sharp analysis of Bitcoin, European Web3 projects, and crypto regulatory challenges. Splitting his time between Geneva and Paris, he brings a unique perspective blending traditional finance with blockchain innovation. He regularly collaborates with crypto platforms across Europe to help make digital investing more accessible.
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