Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, is spending billions of dollars to reposition itself as financial infrastructure rather than a standalone exchange, according to an interview with its co-chief executive published Friday.
The Wyoming-based company is unifying trading, banking, asset management and services for other businesses on a single internal ledger. “We’re not a holding company,” co-CEO Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack.”
The buildout leans on acquisitions. Payward bought the US futures brokerage NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion and the derivatives exchange Bitnomial, which comes with its own clearinghouse, for $550 million. Both deals brought regulatory permissions that would take years to assemble from scratch, which is the point: licenses and clearing capability are the expensive part of moving beyond spot crypto trading.
Partnerships with Wall Street
Traditional finance ties are expanding alongside the dealmaking. Nasdaq has invested $100 million in Payward, and the two companies are working toward a tokenized stocks launch in the second quarter of 2027. London Stock Exchange Group is in separate talks on tokenized equities under the xStocks brand. In early September, Payward joined SoFi’s exchange network, extending round-the-clock dollar settlement to Kraken’s institutional clients while SoFi lists its SoFiUSD token on Kraken.
Payward also holds a US banking charter through Kraken Financial, a Wyoming special-purpose depository institution. Bloomberg reported in July that the company was close to buying a Lithuanian bank, a step that would extend its European footprint and give it direct access to euro payment rails.
The numbers behind the bet
The company says it can fund the expansion from its own balance sheet. Adjusted revenue reached $508 million in the second quarter, up 17 percent from a year earlier, and Payward describes itself as profitable. For full-year 2025, adjusted revenue was $2.2 billion, up 33 percent, with asset-based revenue now 53 percent of the mix against 47 percent from trading.
Kraken counted about 6.6 million funded accounts holding between $40 billion and $50 billion in assets across more than 190 countries and territories. Platform transaction volume reached $2 trillion in 2025. Spot trading averaged about $1.1 billion in daily volume from January through April 2026, according to CoinGecko data cited in the report.
Sethi’s argument is that legacy finance still runs on separate records held by banks, brokers, custodians and clearing houses, and each boundary adds intermediaries, delay and fees. Securities settle in days, markets close overnight and on weekends, and collateral cannot move freely between functions. On shared blockchain rails, he argues, the same asset can serve as an investment, collateral and a programmable instrument at once. Customers would get access to infrastructure that until now sat behind trading firms like Jump Trading and Jane Street.
Renting the rails
The newest piece is Payward Services, a business-to-business division that sells custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, payments and settlement through one set of APIs. At least 25 companies are building products on those rails, Sethi said, with launches expected through the year. Hyperliquid is among the partners.
The division emerged from infrastructure Payward had already built for itself. Packaging it for outside buyers gives the company a revenue stream that does not depend on traders showing up at Kraken. The investment bank Architect Partners called the approach an “Everything Financial Infrastructure” model, in contrast to Coinbase’s consumer-facing “Everything Exchange.” Revenue, it noted, can flow even when the end customer never touches Kraken, because banks and fintechs can embed the infrastructure under their own brands.
“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 wrote.
A regulatory moat, built early
Sethi said Payward built its own compliance and regulatory stack rather than waiting for US crypto legislation to settle, operating across US and European jurisdictions. The company holds more than 100 licenses, which it presents as the moat competitors cannot buy quickly. The NinjaTrader and Bitnomial deals each added futures and derivatives permissions on top.
Around the core accounts, Kraken is adding cards, lending, derivatives and tokenized equities, plus products that let customers borrow against assets or deploy them in decentralized finance applications. Asset management covers tokenized stocks and structured products, with credit products on the roadmap.
Rivals are converging on the same idea
The repositioning comes as the largest exchanges chase similar ambitions. Coinbase is adding stocks, derivatives and prediction markets to its platform. Binance is folding payments, investing and yield products into one app. By volume, though, Kraken remains smaller: Binance controlled 38.7 percent of top-10 exchange spot volume in the second quarter, while Coinbase reported an 8.6 percent share of overall crypto trading volume in the first quarter.
The differentiation, in Payward’s telling, is who the customer is. Coinbase and Binance sell to traders and retail users under their own brands. Payward wants to sell the plumbing to other financial companies, including firms that would never market a product as crypto.
An IPO is not imminent. Payward confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC in November 2025, but CoinDesk reported this month, citing two people familiar with the matter, that a listing will not come before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest. Sethi said the company feels no rush, since the expansion is funded without outside capital.
The bet, in short, is that the valuable layer of crypto finance is not the trading screen but the regulated stack underneath it. Whether banks and fintechs actually plug into a crypto company’s rails, rather than building their own, is the question the next two years will answer.
Sethi’s pitch reduces to a short line. “Fix money, fix the world,” he told CoinDesk.