Payward, the company that owns Kraken, has committed roughly $2.65 billion to acquisitions and is in the process of buying a European bank.
Its co-chief executive describes the company as profitable and in no rush to list.
Its most recent quarter shows adjusted pretax earnings of $23 million, down 71% from a year earlier.
What Is Being Built
Payward is organised around four pillars: trading through Kraken, banking through a Wyoming special-purpose depository institution, asset management, and a business-to-business infrastructure arm.
Co-chief executive Arjun Sethi is emphatic that these are not separate businesses. “We’re not a holding company,” he said. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack.”
The buying has been substantial. NinjaTrader cost $1.5 billion last year, the stablecoin payments firm Reap $600 million, and the derivatives venue Bitnomial $550 million in April. A European bank purchase is in progress, with a Lithuanian target reported in July.
Nasdaq invested $100 million this month and plans to launch Nasdaq Equity Tokens in the second quarter of 2027. Tokenised equities are slated to reach the London Stock Exchange’s 24-hour venue the same year. At least 25 companies are building on Payward’s infrastructure.
Kraken itself has 6.6 million funded accounts and $40 billion to $50 billion in assets across more than 190 countries.
The Number Behind the Ambition
In the second quarter of 2026, adjusted revenue reached $508 million, up 17% year on year.
Adjusted pretax earnings over the same period came to $23 million, against $79.7 million a year earlier. That is a fall of 71%, and it leaves a margin of roughly 4.5% of revenue. Trading volume was $310 billion, lower than a year ago.
Payward publishes no net income figure, only the adjusted measure. So “profitable” is defensible on the number the company chooses to report, and it is a thin number against $2.65 billion of committed acquisitions.
The Part That Argues for Sethi
Revenue rose 17% while trading volume fell. That is the diversification case appearing in the accounts rather than on a slide, and it is the strongest evidence the strategy is working.
Funded accounts grew 42% to a record. If the revenue mix is genuinely moving away from trading fees, then compressed profit is the cost of a transition rather than the signature of a deteriorating business.
That distinction is the entire investment question, and one quarter cannot settle it either way.
On Being in No Rush
Payward filed a confidential draft registration with the SEC on 19 November 2025, then paused its listing plans in March because conditions were unfavourable. Sethi said in May the company was 80% ready to go public.
The valuation picture is mixed. Deutsche Börse bought secondary shares at a $13.3 billion valuation in April, and Payward sought fresh money at $20 billion in May.
Being in no rush and waiting for better conditions describe the same position in different words. Every payoff named in the strategy arrives in 2027.
