Kraken's Parent Bets Billions to Become Financial Infrastructure

Payward, Kraken's owner, is spending billions to build a unified financial platform combining trading, banking, and more.

You might know Kraken as one of the world's biggest crypto exchanges (a marketplace where people buy and sell digital coins like Bitcoin). But its parent company, Payward, has much bigger plans — it wants to become the plumbing behind the entire financial world.

What is Payward trying to do?

Instead of just running a crypto exchange, Payward wants to combine four different businesses into one system:

Trading (buying and selling assets) through Kraken
Banking (holding and moving money)
Asset management (managing investments for people)
Business services (selling its technology to other financial companies)

The key idea is what co-CEO Arjun Sethi calls "one ledger" — a single record system where money and assets can move instantly between products, without the many middlemen, delays, and fees that slow down traditional finance today.

The big numbers:

6.6 million funded accounts on Kraken
$40–50 billion in customer assets held
Operating in over 190 countries
$1.5 billion paid for NinjaTrader (a futures trading company)
$550 million paid for Bitnomial (a derivatives infrastructure firm)
$100 million investment from Nasdaq

Build, buy, or partner

Payward grows in three ways: building tools itself, buying companies that would take years to copy, and partnering with established players. It's even about to buy a bank in Europe (reportedly in Lithuania).

Big names are joining in. Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange are both working with Payward to create "tokenized stocks" — digital versions of real company shares that can trade on blockchain systems.

How it compares

Rivals like Coinbase and Binance are building "everything" apps. But Payward is different — it wants to be the infrastructure that powers *many* brands and companies, not just one app. Experts call this an "Everything Financial Infrastructure" model.

The bottom line: Payward says it is already profitable and in no hurry to go public (list its shares on a stock market). Its bet is that the old financial system is outdated — and blockchain technology can rebuild it faster and cheaper.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/26/kraken-s-parent-payward-is-betting-billions-on-becoming-financial-infrastructure-not-just-a-crypto-exchange