Kraken’s Parent Payward Bets Billions to Become Financial Infrastructure

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, is spending billions of dollars to reposition itself as broad financial infrastructure rather than a standalone trading venue. Under co-CEO Arjun Sethi, the company is stitching together trading, banking, asset management and business-to-business services into a single platform, a strategy built over the past two years and laid bare by a string of disclosures in September 2026.

The scale of the spending is the clearest signal of intent. Payward paid $1.5 billion to acquire NinjaTrader, a U.S. futures brokerage, and $550 million for Bitnomial, a derivatives infrastructure provider. Nasdaq has put $100 million into Payward directly, and Citadel Securities is also listed among the company’s strategic investors. Those are not the moves of a company content to run an order book; they are the moves of a company trying to own the plumbing that connects crypto markets to traditional finance.

From exchange to infrastructure

Payward’s own description of its business is organized around four pillars: Kraken’s core trading platform, banking operations that include Kraken Financial — a Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution — asset management, and a newer division called Payward Services, which sells B2B infrastructure to other companies. That services arm already counts partners including Hyperliquid, and Payward says at least 25 companies are building products on top of it, with launches expected through 2026.

The financial base underpinning this expansion is sizable but not dominant. Kraken reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year-over-year, across roughly 6.6 million funded accounts holding an estimated $40 billion to $50 billion in assets. The exchange operates in more than 190 countries and territories and averaged about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading volume during the first four months of 2026. By comparison, Binance held 38.7% of top-10 centralized-exchange spot volume in the second quarter, while Coinbase’s share of overall crypto trading volume in the first quarter was 8.6%. Kraken’s trading business, in other words, is a meaningful but secondary piece of a much larger ambition.

What the deals signal

The Nasdaq investment is more than a capital injection. The two companies are collaborating on Nasdaq Equity Tokens, expected to launch in the second quarter of 2027, a project that points toward tokenized versions of traditional securities trading alongside crypto assets. Payward has struck a parallel partnership with the London Stock Exchange to list tokenized xStocks on LSE’s planned LSE 24 venue in 2027. Together, these arrangements suggest an emerging convergence in which legacy exchanges and crypto platforms build shared rails rather than competing infrastructures — a theme that echoes recent moves elsewhere in the industry, such as IBM’s work linking tokenized deposits to Swift’s blockchain ledger.

Payward is also reportedly negotiating to acquire a bank in Europe, with earlier reporting pointing to interest in a Lithuanian institution, alongside its existing footprint in the UK. A European banking license would give the company direct access to deposit-taking and payments infrastructure on the continent, complementing its Wyoming depository charter at home. That geographic spread matters because crypto companies have repeatedly found that banking relationships, not trading technology, are often their most fragile asset — a lesson underscored by ongoing scrutiny of banking ties in cases like the DOJ’s forfeiture complaint against Tether and Bitfinex.

Notably, Payward says it supports the U.S. Clarity Act but does not view stalled federal crypto legislation as an obstacle to its growth. That stance is consistent with a broader pattern this year in which companies are building ahead of regulatory clarity rather than waiting for it, a dynamic also visible in the CFTC’s expanded guidance on tokenized assets amid congressional gridlock.

What comes next

Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025, though the offering is not expected before the second quarter of 2027. Between now and then, several concrete markers will show whether this infrastructure strategy is working rather than merely expanding on paper.

• Whether the promised 25-plus companies actually launch products on Payward Services in 2026, and how much revenue that B2B layer generates independent of trading fees.
• Progress on the reported European bank acquisition, which would be Payward’s first direct foothold in EU banking regulation.
• Delivery timelines for Nasdaq Equity Tokens and the LSE 24 xStocks listing, both targeted for 2027, as tests of whether traditional exchanges and crypto platforms can genuinely interoperate.
• How Kraken’s spot trading volume and market share evolve relative to Binance and Coinbase as the company’s attention shifts toward banking and B2B infrastructure.
• Any further regulatory developments affecting how tokenized securities and bank charters intersect, given Payward’s bet that it can build ahead of formal legislation.

For an industry still defining what a crypto exchange is supposed to be, Payward’s wager is that the answer is no longer just an exchange at all.

Source: CoinDesk

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