Payward Bets Billions on Financial Infrastructure Beyond Kraken — SkimNews
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- Payward acquired NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion and Bitnomial for $550 million to add U.S. futures and derivatives capabilities, and co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the firm is "about to buy a bank in Europe"
- Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding Nasdaq Equity Tokens, with the tokens expected to launch in the second quarter of 2027
- London Stock Exchange is partnering with Payward to list xStocks tokenized equities on its forthcoming LSE 24 venue in 2027, subject to regulatory approval
- Payward Services is providing custody, liquidity, compliance and settlement infrastructure via APIs to at least 25 external companies including Hyperliquid, with launches expected this year
- Kraken holds roughly 6.6 million funded accounts carrying between $40 billion and $50 billion in assets across more than 190 countries, according to Sethi
- Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025 but does not plan to go public before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest, per CoinDesk
- Architect Partners framed Payward's model as an "Everything Financial Infrastructure" play — distinct from Coinbase's consumer-facing "Everything Exchange" because it powers multiple brands rather than concentrating users on a single Kraken-branded platform
Why it matters: Payward's B2B infrastructure pivot matters because Kraken averages only about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading — far below Binance's 38.7% share — so growth increasingly depends on third parties building on Payward rails. With 25-plus external clients already in the pipeline and strategic capital from Nasdaq and Citadel Securities, Payward is positioning to capture backend fees across tokenized finance even when end users never interact with the Kraken brand.
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