Kraken spent 15 years as a crypto exchange. In just the last two, its parent company has spent billions of dollars buying a futures brokerage, a derivatives exchange and, if its co-CEO is right, a European bank.
Payward, the Wyoming-based company behind Kraken, doesn’t want to be known as a place to trade coins. It wants to run the pipes underneath trading, banking, asset management and services for other businesses, all on shared infrastructure.
“We’re not a holding company,” he said. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack,” co-CEO Arjun Sethi said.
The one ledger pitch
Sethi’s strategy centers on what he calls “one ledger.” The idea is that money and assets can move between products without the chain of intermediaries that most of traditional finance runs through.
His case against the old system is familiar, and hard to argue with. Securities take time to settle. Markets close overnight and on weekends. Banks, brokers, custodians and clearing houses each keep separate records that have to be reconciled.
Each of those boundaries adds another intermediary, another delay and another fee, Sethi said. He sees blockchain systems as the alternative, letting one asset work as an investment, as collateral and as a programmable instrument on the same infrastructure.
That’s the theory. The more interesting part is how Payward is paying for it.
Buying what would take years to build
Payward builds some pieces in-house. For others, it writes checks.
The company paid $1.5 billion for NinjaTrader to stand up a U.S. futures brokerage, picking up its technology and regulatory permissions. Building that from scratch would have been costly and time-consuming, Sethi said.
Then came a $550 million deal for Bitnomial, which added regulated derivatives infrastructure: an exchange, a clearinghouse and a futures brokerage.
Next on the list is a bank. The firm is “about to buy a bank in Europe,” Sethi said, though he wouldn’t name the target. Bloomberg reported in July that Payward was planning to buy a Lithuanian bank as part of its push into the continent.
Sethi said the company doesn’t keep a shopping list or take broad pitches from bankers. It runs targets through a quantitative framework that asks two things: does this fill an infrastructure gap, and does it give customers something they want?
Some things can’t be bought
Here’s the irony. Some of Payward’s most consequential moves involve partnering with the incumbents blockchain was once supposed to replace.
Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding their work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens and market surveillance technology. The companies expect to launch the tokens in the second quarter of 2027, with Payward handling distribution, trading and post-trade infrastructure.
The London Stock Exchange has also 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.
Sethi didn’t pretend blockchain makes those institutions obsolete. “Trust is their currency,” Sethi said, arguing that Payward can complement established exchanges’ listing and regulatory infrastructure instead of displacing it.
That’s a notably humbler line than crypto executives used to take. It’s also a practical one. You can’t acquire a century of market credibility.
Four pillars, 6.6 million accounts
Payward splits its plan into four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management and Payward Services, its business-to-business infrastructure arm.
The base it’s building on is Kraken’s roughly 6.6 million funded accounts, holding between $40 billion and $50 billion of assets across more than 190 countries and territories, according to Sethi.
Around those accounts, Payward is layering cards, lending, derivatives and tokenized equities, plus products that let customers borrow against their assets or put them to work in decentralized-finance applications. Kraken Financial, its Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, is also part of the stack.
A smaller exchange with a different bet
Payward isn’t the only crypto company chasing the all-in-one financial platform. Coinbase is building an “Everything Exchange” covering crypto, stocks, derivatives and prediction markets. Binance is folding trading, payments, investing and yield products into a single platform.
And on raw exchange volume, Kraken is the smaller player. It averaged about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading during the first four months of 2026. 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.
Digital-assets investment bank Architect Partners argues Payward is playing a different game than Coinbase. Instead of packing every product into a single Kraken-branded app, it’s building infrastructure that can power multiple brands and be rented out to other 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.”
Selling Kraken’s plumbing to everyone else
That second half is Payward Services, and it may be the most telling piece of the whole strategy.
The division grew out of systems Payward had already built for itself: custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, payments and settlement. It now packages those for banks, fintech companies, brokerages and crypto platforms through a common set of APIs and a single integration.
At least 25 companies are building products on it and are expected to launch this year, Sethi said. Hyperliquid is among the partners.
The appeal is distribution that doesn’t depend on getting people to download Kraken. “Payward’s model can work even when the end customer never interacts with Kraken directly,” Architect Partners said.
It’s another revenue stream beyond trading fees. But it also drops Payward into a crowded field of crypto firms already pitching infrastructure to banks and fintechs.
Asset management, tokenized
The same logic is being applied to investment products. Payward has offered custody, staking and yield for years and is now formalizing that into an asset-management platform that can take on more managers, strategies and asset classes.
It isn’t chasing conventional investment mandates. The goal is to be the execution and distribution layer for structured products, tokenized equities, credit and multi-asset strategies, with the assets staying on Payward’s platform.
Tokenized equities come first, followed by structured products that can be split into smaller units and distributed globally. Payward recently partnered with Bitwise on an institutional investment product and expects to add more managers and strategies.
From the outside, these would look like traditional asset management products, Sethi said. Under the hood, they’d be tokenized and administered on Payward’s rails, cutting costs and counterparty exposure.
Not waiting on Washington
Stalled U.S. crypto legislation doesn’t worry Sethi. The company backed the Clarity Act and has spent years educating policymakers, but he said laws formalize industries instead of 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.”
The IPO can wait
All of this is happening on the road to an eventual public listing, though Sethi said Payward isn’t counting on an IPO to pay for any of it.
Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025, but it doesn’t plan to go public before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest, it was reported earlier this month. Sethi wouldn’t go beyond what’s public on timing. He said the company remains profitable, revenue keeps growing and a listing will happen when it’s right for the business, shareholders and regulators.
Payward doesn’t need outside money to run and can fund investments from its balance sheet, Sethi said. Recent raises have been about bringing in strategic partners like Citadel Securities and Nasdaq, whose expertise can help extend the platform.
The numbers give him some room to say that. Payward reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year-over-year.
Sethi’s end goal is to hand ordinary people the same financial infrastructure that firms like Jump Trading and Jane Street use. Whether that’s realistic depends on the European bank deal closing, those 25 partner launches shipping and the Nasdaq tokens hitting their 2027 target. He summed up the plan in four words: “Fix money, fix the world,” Sethi said.
