Kraken parent Payward is unifying trading, payments, asset management and institutional services on common rails, co-CEO Arjun Sethi said.
- Payward is unifying trading, banking, asset management and institutional services on a common infrastructure stack.
- The Kraken parent builds products internally, acquires capabilities that would take too long to develop and partners with established institutions.
- Sethi said Payward is profitable and in no rush to pursue an IPO as it expands its platform.
Kraken spent most of its 15 years building a crypto exchange. Over the past two years, its parent company has been buying and building the pieces of something much bigger.
Payward, its Wyoming-based parent company, spent billions on acquisitions that expanded its reach into futures and derivatives, pushed into tokenized stocks, and pursued additional banking capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.
The moves are part of a bigger goal to turn Payward into a unified financial platform where trading, banking, asset management and services for other businesses can operate under the same infrastructure.
“We’re not a holding company,” he said. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack,” its co-CEO Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk in an interview.
At the center of the strategy is what Sethi calls “one ledger,” which allows money and assets to move between products without the patchwork of intermediaries that sits behind most of traditional finance.
Payward is not alone in pursuing a broader financial platform. Coinbase is building an “Everything Exchange” spanning crypto, stocks, derivatives and prediction markets, while Binance is combining trading, payments, investing and yield products into a single platform.
But Payward is pursuing a different model than Coinbase, according to Architect Partners, a digital-assets investment bank. Rather than concentrating all of its products inside a single Kraken-branded platform, the company is building infrastructure that can support multiple brands and be used by outside financial companies.
“Payward appears to be choosing a different aggregation layer: the regulated infrastructure stack that can power financial products across multiple brands, customer segments, and partner channels,” Architect Partners said.
“In our view, Payward is helping define the next evolution beyond the ‘Everything Exchange’: an ‘Everything Financial Infrastructure’ model.”
Kraken remains smaller by exchange volume: CoinGecko data show it averaged about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading during the first four months of 2026, while Binance controlled 38.7% of top-10 centralized-exchange spot volume in the second quarter and Coinbase reported an 8.6% share of overall crypto trading volume in the first quarter.
One ledger, four businesses
Payward’s thesis is that much of the legacy financial system remains constrained by decades-old technology and market conventions. Securities take time to settle, markets close overnight and on weekends and banks, brokers, custodians and clearing houses maintain separate records that must be reconciled.
Each boundary creates another intermediary, delay and fee, Sethi said. Blockchain systems, in his view, offer an alternative by allowing assets to function as investments, collateral and programmable instruments on shared infrastructure.
Payward has divided that vision into four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management and Payward Services, its business-to-business infrastructure division.
Kraken has about 6.6 million funded accounts holding between $40 billion and $50 billion of assets, according to Sethi, across more than 190 countries and territories.
To grow its vision of a unified financial platform, Payward is now adding services around those accounts, including cards, lending, derivatives and tokenized equities, as well as products that allow customers to borrow against assets or deploy them in decentralized-finance applications. Kraken Financial, its Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, also forms part of the stack.
Build, buy or partner
That thesis is also shaping what the company is buying.
While Payward builds some capabilities internally, it also acquires others that would take years to replicate and partners with institutions whose position cannot simply be bought.
Payward paid $1.5 billion for the acquisition of NinjaTrader to build a U.S. futures brokerage, including its technology and regulatory permissions, which would have been costly and time-consuming, Sethi said. It followed that with a $550 million deal for Bitnomial, adding regulated derivatives infrastructure, including an exchange, clearinghouse and futures brokerage.
The firm is also “about to buy a bank in Europe,” Sethi said, without disclosing who the target was. Bloomberg reported in July that Payward was planning to buy a Lithuanian bank as part of its strategy to expand on the continent.
The company does not maintain a shopping list or broadly solicit pitches from bankers. Instead, it uses a quantitative framework to determine whether a target fills an infrastructure gap and provides capabilities customers want, Sethi said.
However, not every piece of the financial system can be bought. Some of Payward's most consequential recent moves have involved partnering with the incumbent institutions that blockchain technology was once supposed to displace.
Nasdaq, for example, agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding its work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens and market surveillance technology. The companies expect to launch the tokens in the second quarter of 2027, with Payward providing distribution, trading and post-trade infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the London Stock Exchange has separately partnered with Payward to explore tokenized public equities. Subject to regulatory approval, it plans to list xStocks, tokenized representations of publicly traded shares, on its forthcoming LSE 24 venue in 2027.
For Payward, those relationships reflect an acknowledgment that blockchain infrastructure doesn't eliminate everything established exchanges have spent decades building.
“Trust is their currency,” Sethi said, arguing that Payward can complement rather than displace established exchanges’ listing and regulatory infrastructure.
And to continue to chase its vision, Payward isn’t waiting for lawmakers to pave the way first.
Sethi does not see stalled U.S. crypto legislation as an obstacle. The company supported the Clarity Act and has spent years educating policymakers, but he said legislation formalizes industries rather than creating them.
“Bitcoin has been around for 17 years without a market-structure bill,” he said. “Rights come first and laws come later and legislation comes downstream.”
Opening its infrastructure to other companies
Payward is also turning infrastructure originally built for Kraken into a business of its own.
Payward Services offers banks, fintech companies, brokerages and crypto platforms through a common set of APIs. At least 25 companies are building products using the infrastructure and are expected to launch this year, Sethi said. Hyperliquid is among its partners.
The division emerged from infrastructure Payward had already built for itself, including custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, payments and settlement. It now packages those capabilities for external companies through a single integration.
That could give Payward a distribution channel that doesn't depend on directly bringing customers to Kraken, Architect Partners said. Banks, fintechs, brokers and other companies can instead use Payward's infrastructure within products that carry their own brands.
“Payward’s model can work even when the end customer never interacts with Kraken directly,” Architect Partners said.
That strategy gives Payward another potential revenue stream beyond customers trading on Kraken while also putting the company in competition with the growing number of crypto firms selling infrastructure to banks and fintechs.
Bringing asset management onchain
The company is making a similar move with investment products.
Payward has long offered custody, staking and yield products but is now formalizing this activity into an asset-management platform that can accommodate additional managers, strategies and asset classes.
Rather than seeking conventional investment mandates, it wants to provide the execution and distribution layer through which customers can access structured products, tokenized equities, credit and multi-asset strategies while keeping assets on Payward’s platform.
The initial focus is on tokenized equities, followed by structured products that can be divided into smaller units and distributed globally. Payward recently partnered with Bitwise on an institutional investment product and expects to add more managers and strategies.
The products would resemble traditional asset management from the outside but be tokenized and administered on Payward’s rails, reducing costs and counterparty exposure, Sethi said.
No rush to go public
The expansion is taking place as Payward prepares for an eventual public listing. Although Sethi says the company isn't relying on an IPO to finance its ambitions.
Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025, though CoinDesk reported earlier this month that it does not plan to go public before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.
Sethi declined to discuss the timetable beyond what is public, saying Payward remains profitable and revenue continues to grow. A listing will happen when it is right for the business, shareholders and regulators, he said.
Payward also does not need outside money to fund operations and can finance investments from its balance sheet, Sethi said.
Recent capital raises have instead brought in strategic partners, including Citadel Securities and Nasdaq, whose expertise can help extend the platform.
Payward reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, marking a 17% increase year-over-year.
Ultimately, Paywards’s goal is to simplify the financial system through blockchain technology, giving individuals access to the same financial infrastructure used by sophisticated trading firms such as Jump Trading and Jane Street.
Read more: Kraken parent Payward delays IPO to second quarter of 2027 at earliest
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