GTN Hires Ex-Gemini Europe Chief to Lead Tokenized Securities Push

Tokenized stocks were worth about $717 million in October 2025, roughly double a year earlier — and GTN has hired Mark Jennings, former chief executive of Gemini's European business, as global head of digital assets to chase that growth. The appointment, announced Tuesday, puts a former Kraken derivatives-venue operator in charge of the Dubai-based brokerage infrastructure provider's tokenized securities work.

GTN sells banks, brokers and fintechs access to more than 90 markets through a single connection. Tokenized securities place shares and other traditional assets on a blockchain (a shared distributed ledger), where they can trade around the clock. For GTN's institutional clients, the question is practical: what does this change for execution and custody workflows? The answer lies in existing plumbing rather than new build.

"GTN has already done the difficult work to connect to markets and asset classes," Jennings said, positioning the tokenization effort as an extension of the firm's core multi-market access business rather than a separate stack.

What does the hire cover?

Jennings brings venue-level experience from both sides of the crypto-traditional divide. Before Gemini, he held senior roles at Kraken, including chief executive of Crypto Facilities, an FCA-regulated derivatives venue for institutional clients that Kraken acquired in 2019. Gemini hired him to run Europe in January 2025, the month it selected Malta as its hub under the EU's MiCA crypto framework. His tenure there ended when Gemini shut its UK, European Economic Area and Australian accounts on April 6 this year to refocus on the US market.

GTN already has a live tokenization mandate. In July, Kraken parent Payward picked the firm to provide execution, custody and record-keeping for xStocks, its tokenized-equities product, starting with Hong Kong-listed shares before extending to UK, European and South Korean equities.

The segment's size separates mandate from measurement. FM Intelligence data put the total tokenized stock market at roughly $717 million in October 2025 after doubling over twelve months. Kraken separately asserted that the assets backing xStocks alone had passed $800 million by September, with holders exceeding 300,000. The backing-asset figure is an exchange statement, not an independent count, and exceeds the third-party market-size estimate — a gap desks should note when weighing liquidity claims in this segment.

Who else has GTN hired?

Jennings joins a year of senior appointments:

• Salim Sebbata left Capital.com in April to become chief commercial officer for Europe.
• Daniel Endler, after 13 years at Saxo Bank, became GTN's first group chief product officer in October.

Headcount has moved with the hiring. GTN reported more than 700 staff and 500 clients on Tuesday, up from 600 staff and 450 clients in March, when it won a Hong Kong securities dealing licence. That licence gave the firm its sixth regulated entity; five of the six answer to regulators covered by FM Intelligence's licence and registration monitoring, with the US broker-dealer the exception.

Manjula Jayasinghe, GTN's co-founder and group CEO, said demand for tokenized securities is growing and is likely to accelerate in the years ahead — an assertion that current doubling data supports in direction, if not yet in scale.

Jennings' first task will be converting the xStocks mandate and the Kraken relationship into a broader tokenized-securities offering across GTN's 90-plus connected markets.