Payward’s Strategic Billions: Building a Comprehensive Financial Infrastructure Beyond Crypto

Payward has structured its expansive vision around four core pillars: trading via Kraken, banking, asset management, and Payward Services, its business-to-business infrastructure division.

With approximately 6.6 million funded accounts holding between $40 billion and $50 billion in assets, Kraken has established a significant global footprint across more than 190 countries and territories, according to Sethi.

To realize its vision of a unified financial platform, Payward is expanding the ecosystem around these accounts by introducing services such as cards, lending, derivatives, and tokenized equities. Additionally, the company is developing products that allow users to borrow against their assets or deploy them in decentralized finance applications. Kraken Financial, the firm’s Wyoming-chartered special-purpose depository institution, is also a key component of this integrated financial stack.

Build, buy or partner

This overarching thesis is directly shaping the company’s acquisition strategy.

While Payward develops certain capabilities internally, it also acquires others that would otherwise take years to replicate, while partnering with institutions whose market position cannot be easily bought.

Payward acquired NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion to establish a U.S. futures brokerage, gaining its technology and regulatory permissions—capabilities that would have been highly costly and time-consuming to develop from scratch, Sethi noted. This was followed by a $550 million acquisition of Bitnomial, which added regulated derivatives infrastructure, including an exchange, clearinghouse, and futures brokerage.

The firm is also “about to buy a bank in Europe,” Sethi said, though he did not disclose the target. Bloomberg previously reported in July that Payward was planning to acquire a Lithuanian bank as part of its strategy to expand its footprint across the continent.

Rather than maintaining a broad shopping list or actively soliciting pitches from bankers, the company utilizes a quantitative framework to evaluate potential targets. This framework determines whether a candidate fills a critical infrastructure gap and offers the specific capabilities that customers demand, Sethi explained.

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