Payward Spends Billions Building Financial Infrastructure Beyond — SkimNews
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Payward has spent billions on acquisitions to expand beyond crypto trading, including a $1.5 billion deal for futures brokerage NinjaTrader and a $550 million purchase of derivatives infrastructure provider Bitnomial.
- Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the company is 'about to buy a bank in Europe,' with Bloomberg reporting in July that a Lithuanian bank was the target.
- Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens, with a tokenized equity launch planned for Q2 2027.
- Payward Services, the company's B2B infrastructure division, is providing custody, liquidity, compliance and settlement APIs to at least 25 outside companies expected to launch this year, with Hyperliquid among its partners.
- The London Stock Exchange partnered with Payward to explore listing xStocks tokenized equities on its forthcoming LSE 24 venue in 2027.
- Kraken holds roughly $40–50 billion in assets across 6.6 million funded accounts in 190+ countries, but CoinGecko data show it averaged only about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading in early 2026 — far behind Binance's 38.7% centralized-exchange share.
- Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025 but does not plan to go public before Q2 2027 at the earliest, with Sethi saying the company is profitable and self-funding its expansion.
- Architect Partners characterized Payward's model as defining 'the next evolution beyond the Everything Exchange: an Everything Financial Infrastructure model' that can serve multiple brands and partners rather than concentrating customers inside Kraken.
Why it matters: Payward is deliberately diverging from Coinbase's single-brand 'Everything Exchange' playbook by selling its trading, custody and settlement rails to outside banks, fintechs and brokers — at least 25 partners are expected to launch on Payward Services this year. That B2B distribution layer means Payward can generate revenue from infrastructure even when end users never touch Kraken, turning a $1.1 billion-a-day exchange into the backbone for someone else's product.
Ask SkimNews
