Payward, the parent company of Kraken, is trying to become far more than the owner of a crypto exchange. The Wyoming-based firm is combining trading, banking, asset management and institutional services on a shared infrastructure stack, according to co-CEO Arjun Sethi, who described the company’s model as a single platform rather than a loose collection of businesses.
“We’re not a holding company,” Sethi told CoinDesk. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack.”
Kraken spent most of its first 15 years building a crypto exchange. Over the last two years, Payward has been buying and building the parts of a broader financial platform. The company has spent billions on acquisitions that added futures and derivatives capabilities, expanded its push into tokenized stocks and sought extra banking capacity in the U.S. and Europe.
At the center of that plan is what Sethi calls “one ledger,” a structure intended to let money and assets move across products without the layered patchwork of intermediaries common in traditional finance.
Payward is not alone in chasing a broader platform strategy. Coinbase is building what it has called an “Everything Exchange” across crypto, stocks, derivatives and prediction markets, while Binance is combining trading, payments, investing and yield products under one roof. Architect Partners, a digital-assets investment bank, said Payward is taking a different route. Instead of concentrating every product within a single Kraken-branded destination, it is building regulated infrastructure that can support multiple brands and external financial firms.
Architect Partners said Payward appears to be choosing “the regulated infrastructure stack that can power financial products across multiple brands, customer segments, and partner channels.” In the firm’s view, that places Payward beyond the “Everything Exchange” concept and into what it called an “Everything Financial Infrastructure” model.
Kraken remains smaller than its biggest exchange rivals by volume. CoinGecko data show Kraken averaged about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading in the first four months of 2026. Binance controlled 38.7% of top-10 centralized-exchange spot volume in the second quarter, while Coinbase reported an 8.6% share of overall crypto trading volume in the first quarter.
One ledger, four business lines
Payward’s basic argument is that much of the legacy financial system still runs on old technology and old market habits. Securities take time to settle. Markets close overnight and on weekends. Banks, brokers, custodians and clearing houses keep separate records that later need to be reconciled.
Each handoff adds another intermediary, another delay and another fee, Sethi said. In his view, blockchain systems offer a different structure, one where assets can serve as investments, collateral and programmable instruments on shared rails.
Payward has organized that idea into four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management and Payward Services, its business-to-business infrastructure arm.
According to Sethi, Kraken has about 6.6 million funded accounts and between $40 billion and $50 billion of assets across more than 190 countries and territories.
To expand that base into a unified financial platform, Payward is adding cards, lending, derivatives and tokenized equities, as well as products that let customers borrow against their holdings or put assets to work in decentralized finance applications. Kraken Financial, the company’s Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, is also part of that stack.
Build, buy or partner
The company’s acquisition strategy follows the same logic. Some capabilities are built internally. Others are acquired when reproducing them would take years. And some positions in finance, Sethi said, can only be reached by partnering with institutions that already hold them.
Payward paid $1.5 billion for NinjaTrader to establish a U.S. futures brokerage and to obtain technology and regulatory permissions that would have been expensive and slow to build from scratch, Sethi said. It then followed with a $550 million acquisition of Bitnomial, adding regulated derivatives infrastructure that includes an exchange, a clearinghouse and a futures brokerage.
Sethi also said Payward is “about to buy a bank in Europe,” though he did not identify the target. Bloomberg reported in July that the company was planning to acquire a Lithuanian bank as part of its European expansion strategy.
He said Payward does not keep a standing shopping list or broadly entertain pitches from bankers. Instead, the company uses a quantitative framework to decide whether an acquisition target closes a gap in infrastructure and delivers capabilities customers want.
Not every part of the financial system can be bought, however. Some of Payward’s most important recent steps have come through partnerships with incumbent institutions that blockchain advocates once expected to replace.
Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward and expand work with the company 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.
Separately, the London Stock Exchange has partnered with Payward to explore tokenized public equities. If regulators approve, it plans to list xStocks, tokenized representations of publicly traded shares, on its upcoming LSE 24 venue in 2027.
For Payward, those relationships reflect a practical view of what blockchain can and cannot replace. “Trust is their currency,” Sethi said, arguing that Payward can complement established exchanges rather than displace their listing and regulatory infrastructure.
He also said stalled U.S. crypto legislation is not a barrier to executing the strategy. Payward backed the Clarity Act and has spent years educating policymakers, but Sethi argued that legislation formalizes 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.”
Opening infrastructure to outside companies
Payward is also turning technology originally built for Kraken into a separate line of business.
Payward Services offers a common set of APIs to banks, fintechs, brokerages and crypto platforms. Sethi said at least 25 companies are already building products on that infrastructure and are expected to go live this year. Hyperliquid is one of its partners.
The division grew out of systems Payward had built for itself, including custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, payments and settlement. Those capabilities are now being packaged for external companies through a single integration.
Architect Partners said that gives Payward a distribution path that does not rely on funneling customers directly to Kraken. Banks, fintech firms, brokers and other institutions can use Payward infrastructure inside products carrying their own brands.
“Payward’s model can work even when the end customer never interacts with Kraken directly,” Architect Partners said.
That opens another possible source of revenue beyond trading activity on Kraken. It also puts the company into competition with the growing list of crypto firms selling infrastructure to banks and fintech companies.
Putting asset management onchain
Payward is making a similar shift in investment products. The company has long offered custody, staking and yield services, and is now formalizing that activity into an asset-management platform that can host additional managers, strategies and asset classes.
Rather than pursuing conventional investment mandates, Payward wants to be the execution and distribution layer through which customers reach structured products, tokenized equities, credit products and multi-asset strategies while keeping assets on the Payward platform.
Its first focus is tokenized equities, 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 over time.
Sethi said the products may look like traditional asset-management offerings on the surface, but will be tokenized and administered on Payward’s rails, which he said can reduce costs and counterparty exposure.
No rush toward an IPO
The expansion is happening while Payward prepares for an eventual public listing, though Sethi said the company is not depending on an IPO to fund its ambitions.
Payward confidentially filed for an initial public offering in November 2025. CoinDesk reported earlier this month that the company does not plan to go public before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.
Sethi declined to go beyond what is already public on timing. He said Payward remains profitable and revenue is still growing, and that a listing will happen when the timing works for the business, its shareholders and regulators.
He added that Payward does not need outside capital to fund operations and can pay for investments from its own balance sheet.
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, up 17% from a year earlier.
In the long run, the company’s stated aim is to simplify finance through blockchain infrastructure and give individuals access to the same caliber of financial rails used by sophisticated trading firms such as Jump Trading and Jane Street.
“Fix money, fix the world,” Sethi said.