Kraken parent Payward expands beyond crypto trading with billions in acquisitions

Payward moves past crypto trading with billions in acquisitions

Payward, the Wyoming-based parent company of the crypto exchange Kraken, has spent billions over the past two years buying businesses that take it beyond crypto trading. The deals added futures and derivatives, tokenized stocks and banking services in the U.S. and Europe, co-CEO Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk in an interview.

Sethi said the goal is to run trading, banking, asset management and services for other companies on one shared set of systems. "We're not a holding company," he said. "It's one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack."

Key points from the interview

• Payward wants trading, banking, asset management and business-to-business services to sit on common infrastructure, built around what Sethi calls "one ledger."
• Kraken has about 6.6 million funded accounts holding between $40 billion and $50 billion of assets, across more than 190 countries and territories, according to Sethi.
• Kraken averaged about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading in the first four months of 2026, according to CoinGecko data. Spot trading means buying and selling an asset for immediate delivery.
• Sethi said Payward builds some products itself, buys capabilities that would take too long to develop, and partners with established institutions. He said the company is profitable and in no rush to hold an initial public offering, or IPO.

The four parts of the Payward plan

Payward has divided the plan into four areas: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management and Payward Services, its division that provides infrastructure to other businesses. Kraken has spent most of its 15 years as a crypto exchange, according to the article.

Why Sethi says shared records matter

Sethi said much of traditional finance is held back by old technology and market rules. Securities take time to settle, markets close at night and on weekends, and banks, brokers, custodians (firms that hold assets for clients) and clearing houses each keep separate records that have to be matched up.

He said each of those boundaries adds a middleman, a delay and a fee. In his view, blockchain systems, which keep a shared record of transactions, offer another route because assets can work as investments, collateral and programmable instruments on shared infrastructure. At the center of the strategy is what he calls "one ledger," which is meant to let money and assets move between products without the patchwork of intermediaries behind most traditional finance.

How Payward compares with Coinbase and Binance

Payward is not alone in building a wider financial platform. Coinbase is building an "Everything Exchange" spanning crypto, stocks, derivatives and prediction markets, while Binance is combining trading, payments, investing and yield products into a single platform.

Architect Partners, a digital-assets investment bank, said Payward is taking a different path. Instead of concentrating all products inside a single Kraken-branded platform, it is building infrastructure that can support multiple brands and be used by outside financial companies. "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 bank added that in its view Payward is helping define an "Everything Financial Infrastructure" model.

Kraken's trading volume next to larger rivals

Kraken remains smaller by exchange volume. The CoinGecko data cited in the article put its average daily spot trading at about $1.1 billion in the first four months of 2026. Binance controlled 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.

What is confirmed

• Payward is based in Wyoming and is the parent company of Kraken.
• Arjun Sethi is co-CEO of Payward and Kraken and spoke to CoinDesk in an interview.
• Payward has bought businesses in futures and derivatives, tokenized stocks, and banking in the U.S. and Europe over the past two years.
• The plan is organized into four areas: trading, banking, asset management and Payward Services.

What is still unclear

The supplied material does not give a full list of the new services Payward is adding, their launch dates, costs or revenue targets, and it does not name the acquired companies or the amounts paid for each one. Payward describes itself as profitable, but no financial statements are provided in the source. The figures for accounts, assets and trading volume come from Sethi or from CoinGecko, and they are not independently verified in the material available. The Architect Partners assessment is the opinion of that bank, not a confirmed outcome.

Why this matters for crypto and finance

If the plan proceeds as described, Payward would compete not just for crypto traders but also with Coinbase and Binance, which are widening their own platforms, and with traditional firms that handle trading, banking and asset management. Architect Partners' view is that Payward's infrastructure could be used by other companies rather than only by Kraken customers, which would put it in a different part of the market than a single branded exchange.

Sources

• CoinDesk