Kraken Platform Payward Acquires Payments Firm Reap

Payward, the financial infrastructure platform behind cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, has acquired payments infrastructure firm Reap.

The deal, announced in May and completed Wednesday (July 1), is designed to expand Payward Services, the company’s B2B infrastructure platform, opening a path to “globally regulated infrastructure” for stablecoin payments and card issuance.

“We are building the rails for an open, global financial system, where stablecoins are the settlement medium and tokenized assets are the native collateral underneath every transaction,” Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward and Kraken, said in a news release.

Reap, he continued, lets partners issue cards, originate cross-border payments, and manage treasury “against on-chain liquidity that settles in near real time, programmatically, through one API” instead of a series of correspondent banks and regional processors.

Each new partner compounds the network, bringing more issuance, corridors, and stablecoin velocity, and reduced downstream friction.

“That is how an open financial system actually scales, not as a single product, but as shared infrastructure that anyone can extend,” Sethi added.

With Reap, the Payward Services infrastructure now includes embedded card issuance, cross-border money movement, and stablecoin-based treasury management capabilities as well as access to Payward’s global liquidity, custody, and settlement infrastructure.

Rather than working with separate vendors or disparate pieces of infrastructure, partners can tap these services via Payward’s platform, the release added.

“Stablecoin settlement is becoming the default for how businesses move money across borders, and Reap was built from day one to be the infrastructure that makes that work,” said Reap Co-Founder Daren Guo.”With Payward, we can bring that to more markets, more partners, and power the agentic payment flows that will define the next generation of embedded card issuance and financial operations.”

In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday (June 30) about the changing dynamic around these coins with the launch of Open USD, or OUSD, a dollar-backed stablecoin supported by high profile companies including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Coinbase, Google Cloud and IBM.

Rather than concentrating reserve economics with one issuer, Open USD will let participating institutions mint and redeem the token with no volume limits while sharing reserve income across the network, minus operating costs.

“The OUSD initiative transforms the question across crypto from, ‘Which stablecoin wins? to ‘Which network becomes the default financial infrastructure for global digital dollars?’,” PYMNTS wrote. “If that transition takes hold, the stablecoin market will begin to resemble the internet itself, with open standards at the core and the greatest value accruing to the platforms, applications and networks built on top of them, rather than to the protocol alone.”

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