Payward, the Wyoming-based parent company of Kraken, is spending billions to reposition itself as unified financial infrastructure rather than a crypto exchange, co-CEO Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk in an interview. The company is consolidating trading, banking, asset management and business-to-business services onto a single technology and regulatory stack.

"We're not a holding company," Sethi said. "It's one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack."

At the core of the strategy sits what Sethi calls "one ledger" — shared infrastructure that lets money and assets move between products without the intermediary patchwork that sits behind most of traditional finance. Securities settlement delays, overnight market closures and the separate records maintained by banks, brokers, custodians and clearing houses each create another intermediary, delay and fee, he argued. Blockchain systems, in his view, let assets function simultaneously as investments, collateral and programmable instruments.

Billions in acquisitions

Payward has organized the platform into four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking, asset management and Payward Services, its B2B infrastructure division.

The acquisitions fill gaps that would take years to replicate. Payward paid $1.5 billion for NinjaTrader to build a U.S. futures brokerage, acquiring its technology and regulatory permissions in a package Sethi said would have been costly and slow to build. It followed with a $550 million deal for Bitnomial, adding a regulated exchange, clearinghouse and futures brokerage.

The firm is also "about to buy a bank in Europe," Sethi said, without naming the target. Bloomberg reported in July that Payward planned to buy a Lithuanian bank as part of its continental expansion.

Payward does not keep a shopping list or solicit pitches from bankers. It applies a quantitative framework to determine whether a target fills an infrastructure gap and delivers capabilities customers want, Sethi said.

Partnering with the incumbents

Not every capability can be bought. Some of Payward's most consequential recent moves involve partnerships with the very institutions blockchain was once expected to displace.

Nasdaq agreed this month to invest $100 million in Payward while expanding collaboration on Nasdaq Equity Tokens and market surveillance technology. The companies expect to launch the tokens in the second quarter of 2027, with Payward providing distribution, trading and post-trade infrastructure.

The London Stock Exchange has separately partnered with Payward to explore tokenized public equities. Subject to regulatory approval, the LSE plans to list xStocks — tokenized representations of publicly traded shares — on its forthcoming LSE 24 venue in 2027.

"Trust is their currency," Sethi said of established exchanges, arguing Payward can complement rather than displace their listing and regulatory infrastructure.

Infrastructure as a business

Payward is also turning infrastructure originally built for Kraken into a standalone business. Payward Services offers custody, liquidity, compliance, risk management, payments and settlement to banks, fintechs, brokerages and crypto platforms through a common set of APIs. At least 25 companies are building products on the infrastructure and are expected to launch this year, Sethi said. Hyperliquid is among the partners.

The digital-assets investment bank Architect Partners sees this as a distinct model from the "Everything Exchange" strategies pursued by Coinbase and Binance. Rather than concentrating products inside a single Kraken-branded platform, Payward is building infrastructure that can power products across multiple brands, customer segments and partner channels.

"In our view, Payward is helping define the next evolution beyond the 'Everything Exchange': an 'Everything Financial Infrastructure' model," Architect Partners said. "Payward's model can work even when the end customer never interacts with Kraken directly."

That positions Payward in competition with the growing number of crypto firms selling infrastructure to banks and fintechs, while adding a revenue stream independent of Kraken's trading volumes.

On the exchange side, Kraken remains a smaller player. CoinGecko data show it averaged roughly $1.1 billion in daily spot trading during the first four months of 2026, while Binance controlled 38.7% of top-10 centralized-exchange spot volume in the second quarter and Coinbase reported an 8.6% share of overall crypto trading volume in the first quarter. Kraken holds about 6.6 million funded accounts with between $40 billion and $50 billion in assets across more than 190 countries and territories, according to Sethi.

Asset management onchain

Payward is formalizing its custody, staking and yield businesses into an asset-management platform that can host additional managers, strategies and asset classes. Rather than seeking conventional mandates, it wants to provide the execution and distribution layer for structured products, tokenized equities, credit and multi-asset strategies. The initial focus is tokenized equities, followed by fractionalized structured products distributed globally. Payward recently partnered with Bitwise on an institutional investment product and expects to add more managers.

No rush to list

Payward confidentially filed for an IPO in November 2025, but CoinDesk reported earlier this month that the company does not plan to go public before the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest. Sethi declined to discuss the timetable beyond what is public. He said Payward remains profitable, revenue continues to grow, and the company can finance investments from its balance sheet. Recent capital raises have instead brought in strategic partners, including Citadel Securities and Nasdaq.

Payward reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year-over-year.

Sethi does not view stalled U.S. crypto legislation as an obstacle. Payward supported the Clarity Act and has spent years engaging policymakers, but he argued that legislation formalizes industries rather than creating them. "Bitcoin has been around for 17 years without a market-structure bill," he said. "Rights come first and laws come later and legislation comes downstream."

The next concrete milestones land in 2027: Nasdaq Equity Tokens in the second quarter, the LSE 24 listing of xStocks subject to approval, and the earliest possible window for a public listing.