That’s according to a report Sunday (Sept. 27) by CoinDesk, citing an interview with Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken parent Payward.
The report noted that Payward has spent heavily on acquisitions that expanded its footprint in the futures and derivatives spaces and into tokenized stocks, and gone after additional banking capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.
These moves are part of a larger goal of transforming Payward into a unified financial platform combining trading, banking, asset management and services for other businesses.
“We’re not a holding company,” Sethi told CoinDesk. “It’s one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack.”
At the nexus of the strategy is what Sethi describes as “one ledger,” which lets money and assets move between products minus the patchwork of intermediaries that underpins most of traditional finance.
The report noted that Payward is not the only company in the digital asset space targeting a larger financial platform. For example, Coinbase is developing what it calls its “Everything Exchange” covering crypto, stocks, derivatives and prediction markets, while Binance is melding trading, payments, investing and yield products into a single platform.
However, Payward is after a different model than Coinbase, the report said, citing Architect Partners, a digital-assets investment bank.
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Instead of keeping all its products inside a single Kraken-branded platform, the company is constructing infrastructure that can uphold multiple brands and be used by third-party financial companies.
“Payward appears to be choosing a different aggregation layer: the regulated infrastructure stack that can power financial products across multiple brands, customer segments, and partner channels,” Architect Partners said.
“In our view, Payward is helping define the next evolution beyond the ‘Everything Exchange’: an ‘Everything Financial Infrastructure’ model.”
Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote about the evolution of stablecoin payments in July following Payward’s $600 million acquisition of Reap.
“Stablecoins do not need to become a consumer habit to become a corporate payments force,” that report said. “They only need to become useful enough, compliant enough and embedded enough that businesses stop thinking of them as crypto at all.”
And while there is a huge untapped opportunity for corporate adoption, the flip side is that most businesses aren’t that interested in stablecoins.
Data in “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” part of PYMNTS Intelligence’s 2026 Certainty Project, shows that the majority of middle market companies are still cautious about digital assets, with just 13% of firms using stablecoins and 5% employing other forms of cryptocurrency.
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