Bank of New York Mellon is in talks with Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, over a broad digital asset partnership, CoinDesk reported, citing people familiar with the discussions.

The potential agreement could span crypto products, custody, wealth management, trading, payments and financial-market infrastructure delivered through Payward Services, the company's business-to-business platform that serves banks, exchanges and asset managers. The discussions remain ongoing and may not produce a final deal, according to the report.

One person familiar with the talks told CoinDesk that parts of a BNY agreement could resemble Payward's infrastructure deal with Nasdaq. That arrangement, agreed in September, saw Nasdaq Ventures commit $100 million to Payward while expanding an existing collaboration around tokenized equities and always-on market infrastructure.

Under the Nasdaq agreement, Payward will connect Nasdaq's tokenized equities framework with its xStocks infrastructure and adopt Nasdaq's market-surveillance technology across its trading venues. The two companies are building the operational and commercial plumbing for Nasdaq Equity Tokens, with a launch targeted for the second quarter of 2027.

Strategic fit on both sides

For BNY, one of the world's largest custody banks, a Payward deal would extend an existing digital asset buildout. The bank has already been working on tokenized deposits and onchain settlement for institutional clients, and a partnership would give it a direct link to crypto-native trading, custody and payments rails rather than building that capability in-house.

For Payward, the appeal is distribution. The company has broadened well beyond Kraken's original spot crypto exchange. Its operations now span derivatives, tokenized equities, custody, staking, payments and traditional securities, while Payward Services sells that infrastructure to financial institutions and fintech firms. An agreement with BNY would plug those products into one of the deepest institutional client networks in custody banking.

The talks form part of a wider pattern of Payward striking partnerships with established financial networks. Earlier in September, the company announced an agreement with SoFi covering banking, payments, liquidity and digital assets, including access to Kraken Prime and SoFi's real-time settlement network.

Payward's xStocks infrastructure has become central to that strategy. In March, the company said xStocks had surpassed $25 billion in transaction volume, including more than $4 billion settled onchain, as it began working with Nasdaq on infrastructure linking regulated and permissionless tokenized equity markets.

What to watch

If the talks succeed, the combined arrangement would pair a systemically important custody bank with a crypto-native infrastructure stack, a market-structure step that regulators and institutional allocators would scrutinize closely. The Nasdaq Equity Tokens launch in the second quarter of 2027 provides the nearest concrete milestone against which progress on any BNY-Payward rollout could be measured.