Payward invests billions to transform into unified financial infrastructure

Payward, the company behind Kraken, is no longer content being known as a crypto exchange. Through a string of billion-dollar acquisitions and heavyweight partnerships with traditional finance institutions, the firm is rebuilding itself as something closer to financial plumbing, the kind of infrastructure that sits beneath both crypto and equity markets.

Payward’s 2025 adjusted revenue hit $2.2B, a 33% jump year-over-year. More than half of that revenue, 53%, now comes from asset-based services rather than simple trading fees.

The acquisition blitz

The most eye-catching deal was its $1.5B acquisition of NinjaTrader, a move that gave the company serious derivatives infrastructure and a foothold in futures trading that extends well beyond crypto. Then came the purchase of Reap Technologies, a Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments company, for up to $600M. Following that, Payward acquired Bitnomial for up to $550M, adding regulated derivatives exchange capabilities to its growing toolkit.

NinjaTrader brings retail and institutional derivatives. Reap brings cross-border stablecoin payment rails. Bitnomial brings regulated crypto derivatives. Together, they form the skeleton of a platform that can handle trading, payments, custody, and settlement across asset classes.

Traditional finance comes knocking

In April 2026, Deutsche Börse invested $200M in the company, a deal that valued Payward at approximately $13.3B. Deutsche Börse operates the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Five months later, Nasdaq Ventures followed with a $100M investment on September 10, 2026, pushing Payward’s valuation to $21B. The two companies are collaborating on Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs, planned for a Q2 2027 launch. These would be tokenized versions of Nasdaq-listed stocks that include voting rights and target 24/7 settlement. Nasdaq is also integrating its market surveillance technology into Payward’s platform.

The xStocks experiment is working

Payward’s tokenized equities platform, xStocks, has already processed over $25B in cumulative transaction volume by mid-2026. Of that, $4B has been settled onchain. The platform has attracted more than 85,000 unique holders.

What this means for the market

Payward’s platform transaction volume hit $2 trillion, a figure that puts it in the conversation with mid-tier traditional financial infrastructure providers.

The risk side of the ledger deserves attention too. Regulatory frameworks for tokenized securities remain patchwork across jurisdictions. Voting rights attached to tokenized equities raise governance questions that haven’t been fully tested. And the sheer pace of Payward’s acquisition spending means integration risk is real, stitching together NinjaTrader, Reap, and Bitnomial into a coherent platform is an engineering and organizational challenge that money alone doesn’t solve.

Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.