Payward builds 'one ledger' financial infrastructure beyond Kraken

Kraken's parent Payward is betting billions on becoming financial infrastructure rather than just a crypto exchange, unifying trading, banking, asset management and business-to-business services on a common platform, co-CEO Arjun Sethi said.

The strategy — what Sethi calls "one platform, one balance sheet, one regulatory stack" — centers on a shared ledger that lets money and assets move between products without the intermediaries of traditional finance. Payward has spent billions on acquisitions including NinjaTrader and Bitnomial, and Sethi said the company is profitable and in no rush to pursue an IPO as it expands around Kraken's ~6.6 million funded accounts.