Payward Bets Billions on Becoming Financial Infrastructure — SkimNews
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- Payward is unifying trading, banking, asset management and institutional services on a single infrastructure stack built around a "one ledger" that lets money and assets move between products without intermediaries, co-CEO Arjun Sethi said.
- Payward paid $1.5 billion for NinjaTrader to build a U.S. futures brokerage and $550 million for Bitnomial's regulated derivatives infrastructure, and is "about to buy a bank in Europe" — reportedly a Lithuanian institution per Bloomberg.
- Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding Nasdaq Equity Tokens, with products expected to launch in Q2 2027 using Payward for distribution, trading and post-trade infrastructure.
- London Stock Exchange separately partnered with Payward to explore listing xStocks tokenized equities on its forthcoming LSE 24 venue in 2027, subject to regulatory approval.
- Payward Services sells the company's infrastructure through APIs to banks, fintechs, brokerages and crypto platforms; at least 25 companies are building products expected to launch this year, with Hyperliquid among the partners.
- Kraken has about 6.6 million funded accounts holding $40–50 billion of assets across 190+ countries, but averaged just $1.1 billion in daily spot trading in the first four months of 2026, versus Binance's 38.7% top-10 centralized-exchange share and Coinbase's 8.6%.
- Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025 but won't list before Q2 2027 at earliest; Sethi said the company is profitable, self-funding and in no rush to go public.
Why it matters: Payward has committed $2.05 billion in named acquisition prices plus a $100 million Nasdaq investment to build infrastructure it can sell to third-party brands rather than relying on Kraken's exchange volume, which trails Binance and Coinbase. The Nasdaq and LSE tokenized-equity rollouts are now scheduled for 2027 launches, marking a shift from crypto-native experiments to integrations with incumbent venues.
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