Kraken’s parent Payward is betting billions on becoming financial infrastructure, not just a crypto exchange

Kraken spent most of its 15 years building a crypto exchange. Over the past two years, its parent company has been buying and building the pieces of something much bigger.

Payward, its Wyoming-based parent company, spent billions on acquisitions that expanded its reach into futures and derivatives, pushed into tokenized stocks, and pursued additional banking capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.

The moves are part of a bigger goal to turn Payward into a unified financial platform where trading, banking, asset management and services for other businesses can operate under the same infrastructure.

“We’re not a holding company,” he said. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack,” its co-CEO Arjun Sethi told CoinDesk in an interview.