Payward Turns Kraken From an Exchange Into Financial Infrastructure

Kraken's parent company no longer describes itself as just a crypto exchange. In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk, Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the company is unifying trading, banking, and asset management into a single infrastructure. Over 15 years, Kraken has grown from a straightforward crypto trading venue into a much broader financial business.

The parent company's new strategy

According to Sethi, Payward no longer builds separate products under different brands. The company calls its approach "one ledger": client money and assets move between products without the layers of intermediaries that normally sit behind traditional finance. Payward has split its operations into four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management, and Payward Services, a separate unit for B2B infrastructure. Sethi said the lack of a single technology base has long held back traditional financial firms from launching new products quickly, and Payward is trying to avoid that same trap.

"It's one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack."

- Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Payward, from a CoinDesk interview on September 26, 2026

Analysts at Architect Partners believe Payward chose a different path than Coinbase. Instead of a single brand for retail customers, the company is building regulated infrastructure that outside financial firms can use under their own names. Architect Partners frames it as the industry's next stage. After the "everything exchange" model comes the "everything financial infrastructure" model. That means an end customer might never even know Kraken is involved while using a product under someone else's brand running on Payward's rails.

The scale of Kraken's business

Within this infrastructure, customers trade classic assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum alongside newer instruments like tokenized stocks. Sethi said Kraken now has 6.6 million funded accounts holding between 40 and 50 billion dollars in assets, with customers spread across more than 190 countries. Even so, Kraken still trails its biggest rivals by spot trading volume.

CoinGecko data for the first four months of 2026 also puts Coinbase's share at around 8%. By raw trading volume, Kraken remains a much smaller player than the market leaders. That's exactly why Payward is betting not on out-trading its rivals but on selling its own infrastructure to companies that lack that scale and have no plans to build it themselves. For any single customer, the difference is invisible: they simply trade on the familiar Kraken site. Somewhere nearby, that same infrastructure is already running products for other financial firms under their own brands.

Acquisitions and partnerships

Growth here comes mostly through deals rather than organic expansion. The company builds some capabilities in-house, buys others that would otherwise take years to replicate, and partners with institutions whose market position simply cannot be bought outright. Sethi said Payward doesn't keep a running shopping list or field open pitches from bankers. Decisions get made case by case, whenever a specific infrastructure gap is blocking a product the company wants to launch.

• Payward paid 1.5 billion dollars for NinjaTrader to gain an exchange, a clearinghouse, and futures brokerage infrastructure in the US.
• The company is in talks to acquire a bank in Lithuania to expand its banking reach in Europe.
• Payward is working with Nasdaq on tokenized equities and market-surveillance technology.
• A recent partnership with Bitwise added an institutional investment product to the platform.

Sethi described one still-unannounced deal only in broad terms, without naming the target company Payward plans to acquire. Separately, the company is building out Payward Services, a unit that sells banks, fintechs, and brokerages the same infrastructure originally built just for Kraken. That covers custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, and settlement. Launch for outside customers is planned this year, and Sethi sees it as its own revenue stream rather than just a side effect of the core business. It also puts Payward in direct competition with other crypto firms chasing the same goal, selling infrastructure to banks and fintechs rather than just retail traders.

Plans for a public listing

Payward confidentially filed for an IPO back in November 2025, but CoinDesk reports the company doesn't plan to go public before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest. Sethi's explanation was simple. The business is profitable and doesn't need public capital to fund its ambitions. For an industry where many companies treat going public as proof of staying power, that kind of patience looks unusual.

The company also isn't waiting for Congress to settle crypto market-structure rules. Kraken Financial, its Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, already lets some products operate within a clear regulatory framework regardless of when federal legislation eventually arrives. Sethi pointed out that bitcoin has existed for 17 years without such a law, and in his view that hasn't held the industry back. His reasoning is that rights and practice come first, with laws and rules following behind rather than the other way around. The company would rather build products now than wait for lawmakers to provide certainty.