Kraken parent Payward posts $60 million EBITDA, down 66% year on year

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, reported third-quarter adjusted EBITDA of $60 million, down 66% from the $178.6 million recorded a year earlier, as slower trading activity weighed on core exchange earnings while newly acquired businesses lifted the company's share of fee-based revenue.

Total platform margin fell 12% year on year to $487 million. Payward introduced the platform-margin measure this quarter, replacing its previous adjusted-revenue figure and adding a deduction for staking rewards paid to customers. For practitioners reading the reports, that change matters: comparable figures now reflect the gross cost of rewarding stakers, which compresses headline revenue relative to prior disclosures.

How did acquisitions change the revenue mix?

Over the past two years, Payward has pushed beyond its spot-crypto exchange roots through acquisitions in derivatives, proprietary trading, tokenized assets and payments. The strategy is deliberate diversification away from transaction fees, which rise and fall with market activity.

The purchase list is specific:

• NinjaTrader, a futures broker, and Breakout, a proprietary trading firm, both acquired in 2025.
• Bitnomial, a US-regulated derivatives platform, acquired in May 2026.
• Reap, a stablecoin payments and card-issuing business, acquired in July.

Those units visibly shifted the third-quarter mix. Derivatives contracts carrying a per-contract fee rose 84% to 66 million. Margin from subscriptions, trader evaluations and other paid services rose 59% to $125 million. Breakout, which charges traders for evaluations that can qualify them for funded trading accounts, was consolidated for the full quarter after joining in September 2025. Payward did not quantify the individual contribution of Breakout or Reap.

What does the quarter-on-quarter recovery show?

Sequentially, results improved from a weak second quarter. Total transaction volume rose 22%, and total platform margin climbed 12%, to $487 million from $436 million in the prior quarter.

Trading did not carry the recovery alone. Margin earned on assets customers hold across Payward's platforms, including staking-related services, rose 26% to $128 million — roughly half of the $51 million quarterly increase in total platform margin. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled from the second quarter, to $60 million from $23 million, and its margin relative to total platform margin rose to 12% from 5%.

The structural point for operators is the growing weight of services less directly tied to trading volume. Asset- and access-based services accounted for 52% of total platform margin in the quarter, up from 46% a year earlier. In plain terms, Payward now earns slightly more than half its margin from holding balances, subscriptions and evaluations than from transaction execution itself — a profile closer to a diversified brokerage than a pure exchange.

What does this change for the IPO timeline?

The revenue shift bears directly on Payward's path to public markets. The company confidentially filed for a US IPO in November 2025, then paused those plans in March as market conditions weakened. By September, the earliest listing window under consideration was the second quarter of 2027 — more than a year and a half out.

A margin profile weighted toward recurring, service-based revenue typically supports a steadier valuation narrative than one dependent on trading cycles, and the 84% growth in fee-bearing derivatives contracts suggests the acquisition strategy is doing measurable work. Whether that mix can also restore profitability toward the $178.6 million EBITDA level of a year ago is the question investors will press when the 2027 window opens.