Kraken parent’s infrastructure push reaches BNY partnership talks

Kraken’s parent company is discussing a partnership that could bring its financial infrastructure into a broad alliance with custody banking giant BNY. The talks extend beyond cryptocurrency trading: payments, wealth management and the safekeeping of assets could also be involved. CoinDesk (direct) reported the discussions, citing two people familiar with the matter. No agreement is assured.

The company, Wyoming-based Payward, has been building a business that supplies services to other financial firms, alongside running the Kraken crypto exchange. A BNY partnership would advance that effort to connect digital assets with established finance. For now, however, the scope remains under discussion, and the report describes a potential arrangement rather than a signed deal.

Beyond the crypto exchange

The areas being considered include crypto products, custody—the holding and safeguarding of assets—trading, payments, wealth management and supporting infrastructure, the people told CoinDesk. Payward provides these services through Payward Services, its business-to-business platform for banks, exchanges and asset managers. One person said parts of the proposed arrangement could resemble the infrastructure element of Payward’s recent commercial agreement with Nasdaq. That person requested anonymity because the discussions are private.

Parts of a BNY partnership could follow the infrastructure model of Payward’s Nasdaq agreement, according to a person familiar with the talks cited by CoinDesk.

BNY, formerly Bank of New York Mellon, already provides institutional clients with custody, asset servicing, clearing and wealth-management services. Clearing helps financial transactions move toward completion. The bank has also been developing tokenized deposits, or bank deposits represented on a blockchain. Those deposits are intended to enable institutional market participants to settle transactions onchain in close to real time, forming part of BNY’s wider work on digital-asset infrastructure.

Nasdaq offers a concrete example of the relationships Payward is pursuing. Nasdaq Ventures agreed last month to invest $100 million in Payward at a $21 billion valuation, while the companies expanded their work on tokenized equities—shares represented digitally on a blockchain. Their agreement includes continued development of the operating and commercial infrastructure for Nasdaq Equity Tokens.

Acquisitions build out the platform

Payward also agreed to use Nasdaq’s market-surveillance technology, which monitors trading activity, across its crypto, equities, tokenized-equities, futures and options venues. The companies expect Nasdaq Equity Tokens to launch in the second quarter of 2027. The project is designed to connect Nasdaq’s regulated markets with Payward’s xStocks ecosystem while maintaining shareholder rights, regulatory protections and issuer control.

Acquisitions have supported Payward’s expansion into a broader financial-services platform. In April, it agreed to buy U.S. crypto derivatives firm Bitnomial for up to $550 million. Derivatives are contracts linked to the value of an underlying asset. Payward then struck a $600 million deal for stablecoin-payments company Reap. Stablecoins are digital tokens designed to track a reference value, typically a currency. Those agreements followed its roughly $1.5 billion purchase of retail futures platform NinjaTrader in 2025.

The expansion comes as Payward’s planned stock-market listing remains further out. CoinDesk reported last month that its initial public offering had been pushed to the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest, after an earlier shelving because of difficult market conditions. The immediate development to watch is whether the BNY talks produce an agreement—and which services it ultimately covers. Separately, the Nasdaq token project has a stated launch target, but the BNY discussions remain open-ended.