Payward

In July 2011, Jesse Powell and others founded Payward. Powell had earlier helped the bitcoin exchange Mt. GoxMt. GoxMt. Gox was an early bitcoin exchange based in Tokyo, Japan. Jed McCaleb turned it into a bitcoin trading site in 2010 and Mark Karpelès took it over in 2011, after which it became for a time the world’s largest bitcoin trading platform. In February 2014 it halted withdrawals and shut its website, saying about 850,000 bitcoins were missing, and it then went through a civil rehabilitation application, bankruptcy, and civil rehabilitation proceedings at the Tokyo District Court; the trustee has been repaying creditors in bitcoin and bitcoin cash since July 2024, and as of October 2026 the repayment deadline had been extended to October 31, 2027.Open the full entry respond to a security attack. The company’s Kraken was initially positioned as a high-performance cryptocurrency exchange for professional traders and gradually grew into a multi-asset platform serving consumers, professional traders, institutions and businesses.⁠[1]

On October 30, 2024, Kraken announced that Arjun Sethi and Dave Ripley would serve as co-CEOs, with co-founder Jesse Powell serving as chair of the board.⁠[2]

Payward acquired the U.S. futures brokerage NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion and the derivatives exchange and clearinghouse Bitnomial for $550 million, and the acquisition of a European bank was in progress. In 2025 the company launched nine products, including the tokenized stock and ETF platform xStocks, which exceeded $10 billion in trading volume in its first six months.⁠[3][1]

In November 2025, Payward confidentially filed for an initial public offering; as of September 2026, the company did not expect to list before the second quarter of 2027 and was funding its expansion from its own resources.⁠[3]

Payward operates as “one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack,” organized into four pillars: trading (Kraken), banking (Kraken Financial), asset management, and Payward Services for businesses. As of 2026, Kraken had 6.6 million funded accounts and $40 billion to $50 billion in assets, its business covered more than 190 countries and territories, and Payward held more than 100 licenses and registrations; adjusted revenue in the second quarter of 2026 was $508 million, up 17% year over year. NasdaqNasdaqNasdaq is an exchange operator and financial technology company headquartered in New York. It runs The Nasdaq Stock Market and other markets and provides capital markets technology, regulatory technology, and data and index services. Founded in 1971, it combined with OMX AB in 2008, and in March 2026 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved its rules for trading tokenized securities.Open the full entry invested $100 million in the company, and the two have been working with the London Stock Exchange on tokenized equities.⁠[3][1]

Its brands include Kraken, Kraken Pro, Kraken Wallet, NinjaTrader, the proprietary trading platform Breakout, xStocks, CF Benchmarks, the banking app Krak and the payments business Reap. The company completed an $800 million funding round with participation from Citadel, Jane Street, Oppenheimer and Tribe Capital.⁠[1]

On October 14, 2026, Payward announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Saldo Finance Oy, a Finnish holding company, and with it its subsidiary Saldo Bank UABSaldo BankSaldo Bank (Saldo Bank UAB) is a digital specialized bank headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, holding a specialized bank license issued by the European Central Bank and supervised by the Bank of Lithuania; it offers consumer loans, SME loans, credit cards and term deposits in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany, and provides embedded lending services to other fintech companies. In October 2026 Payward, the parent of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, signed an agreement to acquire its Finnish holding company Saldo Finance Oy, with the deal expected to close in 2027.Open the full entry. Saldo Bank is a digital specialized bank licensed by the European Central BankEuropean Central BankThe European Central Bank is the central bank responsible for euro area monetary policy.Open the full entry and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania; it operates in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany and holds a passport to operate in the Netherlands. It offers retail term deposits in all of its markets, consumer loans in Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, and secured and unsecured SME loans in Lithuania and Finland, and provides embedded lending to fintech companies in Finland and Germany. Terms were not disclosed; the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in 2027. As of October 2026, it had not closed.⁠[4][5][5][5][5][5]

Payward said the acquisition brings it an EU banking license and extends its banking business, Payward Banking, into Europe; Payward Banking already held a Federal ReserveFederal Reserve SystemThe Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. Created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, it consists of the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).Open the full entry limited-purpose master account and an electronic money institution license from the Central Bank of Ireland, and had originated more than $2 billion in loans. Once the deal closes, Payward Banking expects, subject to regulatory approvals, to offer European clients interest on deposits, lending products, and banking-as-a-service capabilities such as passporting, card issuance and SME lending. Arjun Sethi said Payward Banking had been built license by license and market by market, that a regulated EU bank would let the company serve European clients the way a primary financial institution should, and that the company was starting in the EU with global ambitions; Saldo Bank president Jarkko Mäensivu said a banking license is only as valuable as what is built on top of it.⁠[5][5][4][4][4][4][4][4]

On November 5, 2026, Payward announced that its affiliated fund Digital Asset Special Investments I, LP and its clients had acquired an undisclosed amount of AAVE on the secondary market. Payward said it could make further purchases and identified asset management as one of its five business pillars. The disclosed purchase concerned AaveAaveAave is a decentralized, non-custodial lending protocol deployed on Ethereum and several other public blockchains, where users can deposit crypto assets into liquidity pools to earn interest or borrow on an overcollateralized basis. The protocol is governed by the Aave DAO, made up of AAVE token holders.Open the full entry’s governance token.⁠[6]

The parties were still exploring future collaboration. Gurpreet Oberoi, Payward’s vice president for asset management and institutional, connected the investment with client demand for onchain finance; Aave founder Stani KulechovStani KulechovStani Kulechov is the founder of Aave and CEO of Aave Labs, and studied law at the University of Helsinki. He founded ETHLend in 2017, went on to develop the Aave lending protocol, and was also involved in launching the Lens decentralized social protocol; his work spans on-chain lending, consumer financial products, and protocol governance.Open the full entry described it as a strategic step toward serving more retail and institutional users.⁠[6]

Payward: Official website: https://www.payward.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/Payward (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/payward/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@paywardinc (opens in a new window)⁠[9]