Payward, the company behind Kraken, is spending heavily to turn itself into financial infrastructure that other firms build on, rather than a crypto exchange that only serves its own customers. CoinDesk reported the strategy on September 26, 2026, laying out a plan co-CEO Arjun Sethi frames as "one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack" tied together by a single internal ledger that moves assets between products.
The scale of the buildout is the story. Payward is assembling four business lines on shared rails: the Kraken trading platform, banking through a Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, asset management covering tokenized equities and structured products, and a business-to-business division called Payward Services that rents out the underlying infrastructure.
The acquisitions behind the pitch
Two deals show where the money is going. Payward bought NinjaTrader, a US crypto futures brokerage, for $1.5 billion, and Bitnomial, a derivatives exchange with its own clearinghouse and futures brokerage, for $550 million. Both purchases came with regulatory permissions that are slow and expensive to build from scratch, which is the point: licenses and clearing capability are the hard part of moving beyond spot crypto.
Sethi told CoinDesk the expansion is funded off the balance sheet, with no immediate need for outside capital. That claim is backed by the numbers Payward disclosed. Q2 2026 adjusted revenue was $508 million, up 17% year over year, and the company says it remains profitable. Kraken's spot trading ran around $1.1 billion in daily average volume from January through April 2026, across roughly 6.6 million funded accounts in more than 190 countries holding $40 billion to $50 billion in assets.
Renting out the rails
The part that separates this from a normal exchange land-grab is Payward Services. The division sells custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, payments, and settlement as infrastructure other companies can plug into through APIs. Payward says at least 25 companies are building on those rails, with products expected to launch through 2026.
That model is closer to what a bank-as-a-service provider does than what a trading venue does. Architect Partners, cited in the report, calls it an "Everything Financial Infrastructure" approach, contrasting it with Coinbase's single-brand "Everything Exchange" and Binance's integrated platform. Payward's version supports multiple brands and external firms on one regulated backend.
The partnership list points the same direction. Nasdaq is investing $100 million and plans Nasdaq Equity Tokens in Q2 2027. Payward has a tokenized public equities partnership with the London Stock Exchange, with an xStocks launch targeted for 2027, plus tie-ins with Bitwise on institutional products and Hyperliquid on infrastructure. These are the kinds of counterparties that only sign once the regulatory and custody plumbing is real.
The regulatory read
Sethi's framing leans on one deliberate choice: Payward built its own compliance and regulatory stack instead of waiting for US crypto legislation to settle. The company operates across US and European jurisdictions, holds a US bank charter through Kraken Financial, and Bloomberg reported in July it was close to buying a European bank, described as a Lithuanian institution. That regulatory footprint is what lets Payward promise banking, custody, and settlement as a service rather than as a promise contingent on future rules.
An IPO sits at the end of the plan. Payward confidentially filed in November 2025, with the earliest listing pegged to Q2 2027. Sethi's line that expansion is financed internally reads as a signal to the market that the raise, when it comes, is about scale rather than survival.
The angle for crypto users
For anyone who spends or holds through Kraken, the direction of travel matters. A Kraken card sits on top of an exchange balance, so the broader the regulated stack underneath, the more the account starts to resemble a bank relationship with card, custody, and settlement in one place. That convenience is the sell. The trade-off is the same one that applies to any exchange-funded card: your spendable balance lives with a third party rather than in a wallet you control, which is the structural difference from cards that let you spend from your own wallet.
Consolidation across trading, banking, and infrastructure also concentrates counterparty exposure. When trading, deposits, custody, and settlement all run on "one balance sheet," a problem in one corner touches more of the stack than it would at a firm that keeps those functions separate. That is the flip side of the efficiency Sethi is selling, and it is worth weighing before treating an exchange account as a full banking substitute.
Overview
Payward is spending billions to reposition Kraken as regulated financial infrastructure, not just a spot exchange. The buildout spans four business lines on a shared ledger, backed by the $1.5 billion NinjaTrader and $550 million Bitnomial acquisitions, a Wyoming bank charter, a pending European bank purchase, and partnerships with Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange. Payward Services opens those rails to 25-plus outside companies. The numbers support the ambition: $508 million in Q2 2026 adjusted revenue, 6.6 million funded accounts, and a possible IPO as early as Q2 2027. For users, the payoff is a bank-like account with a card attached; the cost is deeper reliance on a single third party.
