Key points

  • Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the group is organizing Kraken and its other businesses around a shared ledger, balance sheet and regulatory stack.
  • Previously announced deals for NinjaTrader and Bitnomial, plus a Nasdaq investment, support the plan but leave substantial integration and regulatory work.
  • Sethi said more than 25 outside companies are building on Payward Services and that the group is pursuing a European bank acquisition, with no target disclosed.

A broader operating model

Payward, the parent of crypto exchange Kraken, is positioning its collection of trading and financial businesses as a single infrastructure platform rather than a set of separate acquisitions. Co-chief executive Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk in an interview published Friday that the group is being organized around one ledger, one balance sheet and one regulatory stack. The stated aim is to let customers and partner companies move among crypto, equities, derivatives and other services without rebuilding identity, custody and settlement connections for each product.

Four connected businesses

Sethi described four operating pillars: Kraken's trading venue, banking capabilities, asset management and Payward Services, the business-to-business infrastructure arm. He said more than 25 outside companies are building on Payward Services and are expected to launch this year. That figure is a company disclosure and has not been independently audited. The strategy is notable because it makes shared infrastructure, rather than exchange volume alone, the central measure of Payward's next phase.

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Acquisitions provide the building blocks

Several previously announced transactions supply parts of the plan. Kraken agreed in March 2025 to acquire US futures platform NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion, a deal the company said would expand multi-asset trading. Reuters reported in April that Payward planned to pay as much as $550 million for derivatives exchange Bitnomial. Those transactions extend the group beyond spot crypto trading, but they also create the practical challenge of joining different technologies, licenses and customer bases without weakening controls or service reliability.

Tokenized markets and banking

Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward as the companies work on infrastructure for tokenized securities. The London Stock Exchange Group has separately partnered with Payward on plans that include tokenized equities and extended trading hours. Sethi also said Payward is close to buying a bank in Europe, although he did not identify the institution or describe the transaction as completed. Any banking acquisition would remain subject to the relevant approvals and could change before closing.

Scale with limits

Sethi put Kraken's funded accounts at 6.6 million and assets on the platform at roughly $40 billion to $50 billion across more than 190 countries and territories. Payward reported second-quarter adjusted revenue of $508 million, up 17% from a year earlier. The company is still smaller than the largest global exchanges by trading volume, and expansion into regulated securities, derivatives and banking increases the number of supervisory regimes it must satisfy. A common ledger may simplify product delivery, but it also concentrates operational dependencies that need resilient safeguards.

No immediate public listing

Payward confidentially filed for a US initial public offering in November 2025, but Sethi said a listing is not planned before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest. That leaves the near-term focus on integrating acquisitions, launching partner services and proving that the shared stack can work across jurisdictions. Customers and partners will also need clear information about which entity holds their assets and which protections apply to each product. The fresh disclosure is therefore a strategic roadmap, not a completed transformation: the bank target is undisclosed, partner launches remain pending, and the economics of the combined platform will depend on execution as well as market demand.

Sources

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