Payward Builds Toward Full Financial Infrastructure, Betting on Real-World Assets Tokenization

Kraken spent 15 years as a crypto exchange. Now its parent company wants to be something larger: the plumbing that moves money and assets for many kinds of financial businesses, not just a place where people trade crypto. Payward's push into real-world assets tokenization is central to that plan.

Payward, based in Wyoming, has spent billions buying and building pieces of that vision. It has pushed into futures, derivatives and tokenized stocks, and is working on banking capabilities in the U.S. and Europe. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk that the pieces are meant to work as one system, not a group of separate companies: "We're not a holding company," he said. "It's one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack."

At the core is what Sethi calls a "one ledger" design. In simple terms, it would let money and assets move between products directly, without the chain of middlemen that most traditional financial trades pass through.

A different path from rivals

Payward is not the only company chasing a wider platform. Coinbase is building what it calls an "Everything Exchange" that spans crypto, stocks, derivatives and prediction markets. Binance is putting trading, payments, investing and yield products into one place.

But according to Architect Partners, a digital-assets investment bank, Payward is taking another route. Instead of putting every product under the Kraken name, it is building regulated infrastructure that can sit behind multiple brands and serve outside financial firms.

"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. The firm added that Payward is helping define a model beyond the "Everything Exchange" toward "Everything Financial Infrastructure."

Size is one thing Payward does not lead on. CoinGecko data show Kraken averaged about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading in the first four months of 2026. Binance held 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.

The case for shared rails

Payward's argument is that old market machinery holds finance back. Securities can take days to settle. Markets close at night and on weekends. Banks, brokers, custodians and clearing houses each keep their own records, which then have to be matched up. Sethi says every one of those boundaries adds a middleman, a delay and a cost. Blockchain systems, in his view, let assets act as investments, collateral and programmable tools on shared infrastructure.

The company splits the plan into four areas: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management, and Payward Services, its business-to-business arm. Kraken has about 6.6 million funded accounts holding between $40 billion and $50 billion in assets, Sethi said, spread across more than 190 countries and territories. Payward is adding cards, lending, derivatives and tokenized equities around those accounts, plus products that let customers borrow against assets or use them in decentralized-finance applications. Kraken Financial, its Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, is part of the stack.

Buying what takes too long to build

Some capabilities Payward builds itself; others it buys because copying them would take years. It paid $1.5 billion for NinjaTrader, gaining a U.S. futures brokerage with technology and regulatory permissions that Sethi said would have been slow and expensive to obtain. A $550 million deal for Bitnomial added regulated derivatives infrastructure, including an exchange, clearinghouse and futures brokerage.

The firm is also "about to buy a bank in Europe," Sethi said, without naming the target. Bloomberg reported in July that Payward planned to buy a Lithuanian bank as part of its European expansion. Sethi said the company does not keep a shopping list or field broad pitches from bankers; instead it uses a quantitative framework to judge whether a target fills an infrastructure gap and offers something customers want.

Not everything can be bought. Some of Payward's biggest recent steps involve partnering with the established institutions blockchain was once expected to replace. This month Nasdaq agreed to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens and market surveillance. The companies expect to launch the tokens in the second quarter of 2027, with Payward providing distribution, trading and post-trade infrastructure. Separately, the London Stock Exchange has partnered with Payward to explore tokenized public equities and, subject to regulatory approval, plans to list xStocks, tokenized versions of publicly traded shares, on its LSE 24 venue in 2027.

Sethi said those ties reflect a limit to what blockchain removes: "Trust is their currency," he said, arguing Payward can add to established exchanges' listing and regulatory work rather than replace it.

Regulation, services and an eventual listing

Payward is not waiting for U.S. crypto legislation. It supported the Clarity Act and has spent years talking to policymakers, but Sethi said laws tend to formalize industries rather than create 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 company is also selling infrastructure it first built for Kraken. Payward Services gives banks, fintechs, brokerages and crypto platforms access through a common set of APIs, covering custody, liquidity, compliance, risk, payments and settlement. At least 25 companies are building products on it and are expected to launch this year, Sethi said, with Hyperliquid among the partners. Architect Partners said this could give Payward a way to reach users who never touch Kraken directly: "Payward's model can work even when the end customer never interacts with Kraken directly."

Payward is making a similar move in asset management. It has long offered custody, staking and yield products and is now shaping them into a platform for more managers, strategies and asset classes, starting with tokenized equities and then structured products. It recently partnered with Bitwise on an institutional investment product.

The expansion comes as Payward prepares for a public listing, though Sethi says an IPO is not needed to fund the plan. Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025, but CoinDesk reported this month that it does not expect to go public before the second quarter of 2027. Sethi declined to discuss timing beyond public information, saying the company remains profitable and revenue is growing. Recent raises have brought in strategic partners such as Citadel Securities and Nasdaq for their expertise, he said. Payward reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 17% from a year earlier.

Read more: Kraken parent Payward delays IPO to second quarter of 2027 at earliest

Source: CoinDesk