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Key Takeaways
- Payward has spent billions acquiring futures, derivatives, banking and tokenized-equity capabilities to unify Kraken’s businesses under one platform and balance sheet
- Payward Services now offers Kraken’s custody, compliance and payments infrastructure to outside banks and fintechs, with at least 25 companies building on it
- Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025 but isn’t expected to list before Q2 2027, reporting $508 million in Q2 2026 adjusted revenue, up 17% year-over-year
Kraken spent most of its 15-year history building a crypto exchange. Over the past two years, its parent company, Payward, has spent billions of dollars acquiring and building the pieces of something considerably larger: a unified financial platform spanning trading, banking, asset management and business-to-business infrastructure services.
One Platform, One Balance Sheet
Payward, based in Wyoming, has directed billions of dollars toward acquisitions expanding into futures and derivatives trading, tokenized stocks and additional banking capabilities across the U.S. and Europe.
Payward and Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi described the strategy in an interview as an effort to unify the company’s businesses under shared infrastructure rather than operating them separately.
“We’re not a holding company. It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack.”
Sethi said the strategy centers on what he calls a single ledger, allowing money and assets to move between Payward’s products without the layers of intermediaries typical of traditional finance, where settlement delays, market closures on nights and weekends, and separate recordkeeping across banks, brokers and clearing houses each add friction and cost.
Payward is not alone in pursuing this kind of platform. Coinbase has built what it calls an “Everything Exchange” spanning crypto, stocks, derivatives and prediction markets, while Binance has combined trading, payments, investing and yield products under one platform.
Digital-assets investment bank Architect Partners said Payward’s approach differs by building infrastructure that can support multiple outside brands rather than concentrating products inside a single Kraken-branded platform.
Kraken remains smaller than its largest competitors by trading volume, averaging about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading during the first four months of 2026, according to CoinGecko data, versus Binance’s 38.7% share of top-10 centralized-exchange spot volume in the second quarter and Coinbase’s 8.6% share of overall crypto trading volume in the first quarter.
Building, Buying and Partnering Selectively
Payward has organized its strategy around four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management and Payward Services, a business-to-business infrastructure division. Kraken has about 6.6 million funded accounts holding between $40 billion and $50 billion in assets, according to Sethi, across more than 190 countries and territories.
The company builds some capabilities internally, acquires others it judges too time-consuming to build from scratch, and partners with institutions whose market position cannot simply be purchased.
Payward paid $1.5 billion to acquire NinjaTrader to build a U.S. futures brokerage, followed by a $550 million deal for Bitnomial adding regulated derivatives infrastructure including an exchange, clearing house and futures brokerage.
Sethi said the company is also working to acquire a bank in Europe without naming the target; a report in July said Payward was pursuing a Lithuanian bank as part of its European expansion.
Payward uses a quantitative framework to evaluate whether a potential acquisition fills an infrastructure gap and meets customer demand, rather than maintaining a standing list of targets.
Some partnerships, however, involve institutions blockchain technology was once expected to replace rather than acquire. Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding joint work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens, targeting a second-quarter 2027 launch.
The London Stock Exchange has separately partnered with Payward to explore tokenized public equities, planning, subject to regulatory approval, to list tokenized shares on its forthcoming LSE 24 venue in 2027. Sethi said:
“Those relationships reflect the fact that blockchain infrastructure does not eliminate the value of what established exchanges have built over decades. Their core asset is the trust they carry rather than something Payward could readily replicate on its own.”
Expanding Beyond Kraken’s Own Customer Base
Payward is also packaging infrastructure originally built for Kraken, including custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, payments and settlement, into a standalone service for other companies.
Payward Services offers that infrastructure to banks, fintechs, and crypto platforms through a shared set of APIs. At least 25 companies are building products on it and are expected to launch this year, according to Sethi, with Hyperliquid among current partners.
Architect Partners said the model gives Payward a distribution channel independent of directly acquiring customers for Kraken itself, since partner companies can use its infrastructure within their own branded products.
“Payward’s model can work even when the end customer never interacts with Kraken directly.”
That structure creates a revenue stream independent of Kraken’s own trading volume, while positioning Payward in competition with other crypto firms selling similar infrastructure to banks and fintechs.
Payward is separately formalizing its custody, staking and yield offerings into a broader asset-management platform intended to accommodate additional managers and strategies, positioning itself as the execution and distribution layer for structured products, tokenized equities and multi-asset strategies while keeping assets on its own platform.
The initial focus is on tokenized equities, followed by structured products divided into smaller, globally distributable units; Payward has already partnered with Bitwise on an institutional investment product.
No Rush to Go Public
Payward confidentially filed for an initial public offering in November 2025, though prior reporting indicated the company does not plan to complete a public listing before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.
Sethi declined to discuss the timeline beyond what has already been reported, saying Payward remains profitable with continued revenue growth and that a listing will happen when the timing suits the business, its shareholders and its regulators.
Sethi said Payward does not need outside capital to fund operations and can finance investments directly from its balance sheet.
Recent capital raises, including from Citadel Securities and Nasdaq, brought in strategic partners rather than serving as a primary funding need. Payward reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, a 17% increase year-over-year. Sethi also said:
“I do not view stalled U.S. crypto legislation as an obstacle to Payward’s plans.”
The company supported the Clarity Act and has spent years engaging with policymakers, but Sethi argued that legislation formalizes industries that already exist rather than creating them, pointing to Bitcoin’s 17-year existence without a comprehensive market-structure law as evidence the underlying business can proceed regardless of legislative timing.
