Kraken’s parent Payward is betting billions on becoming financial infrastructure, not just a crypto exchange

Kraken spent most of its 15 years building a crypto exchange. Over the past two years, its parent company has been buying and building the pieces of something much bigger.

Payward, its Wyoming-based parent company, spent billions on acquisitions that expanded its reach into futures and derivatives, pushed into tokenized stocks, and pursued additional banking capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.

The moves are part of a bigger goal to turn Payward into a unified financial platform where trading, banking, asset management and services for other businesses can operate under the same infrastructure.

“We’re not a holding company,” he said. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack,” its co-CEO Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk in an interview.

At the center of the strategy is what Sethi calls “one ledger,” which allows money and assets to move between products without the patchwork of intermediaries that sits behind most of traditional finance.

Payward is not alone in pursuing a broader 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.

But Payward is pursuing a different model than Coinbase, according to Architect Partners, a digital-assets investment bank. Rather than concentrating all of its products inside a single Kraken-branded platform, the company 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.

“In our view, Payward is helping define the next evolution beyond the ‘Everything Exchange’: an ‘Everything Financial Infrastructure’ model.”

Kraken remains smaller by exchange volume: CoinGecko data show it averaged about $1.1 billion in daily spot trading during the first four months of 2026, while 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.

One ledger, four businesses

Payward’s thesis is that much of the legacy financial system remains constrained by decades-old technology and market conventions. Securities take time to settle, markets close overnight and on weekends and banks, brokers, custodians and clearing houses maintain separate records that must be reconciled.

Each boundary creates another intermediary, delay and fee, Sethi said. Blockchain systems, in his view, offer an alternative by allowing assets to function as investments, collateral and programmable instruments on shared infrastructure.

Payward has long offered custody, staking and yield products but is now formalizing this activity into an asset-management platform that can accommodate additional managers, strategies and asset classes.

Rather than seeking conventional investment mandates, it wants to provide the execution and distribution layer through which customers can access structured products, tokenized equities, credit and multi-asset strategies while keeping assets on Payward’s platform.

The initial focus is on tokenized equities, followed by structured products that can be divided into smaller units and distributed globally. Payward recently partnered with Bitwise on an institutional investment product and expects to add more managers and strategies.

The products would resemble traditional asset management from the outside but be tokenized and administered on Payward’s rails, reducing costs and counterparty exposure, Sethi said.

No rush to go public

The expansion is taking place as Payward prepares for an eventual public listing. Although Sethi says the company isn't relying on an IPO to finance its ambitions.

Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025, though CoinDesk reported earlier this month that it does not plan to go public before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.

Sethi declined to discuss the timetable beyond what is public, saying Payward remains profitable and revenue continues to grow. A listing will happen when it is right for the business, shareholders and regulators, he said.

Payward also does not need outside money to fund operations and can finance investments from its balance sheet, Sethi said.

Recent capital raises have instead brought in strategic partners, including Citadel Securities and Nasdaq, whose expertise can help extend the platform.

Payward reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, marking a 17% increase year-over-year.

Ultimately, Paywards’s goal is to simplify the financial system through blockchain technology, giving individuals access to the same financial infrastructure used by sophisticated trading firms such as Jump Trading and Jane Street.

“Fix money, fix the world,” Sethi said.

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