Payward, the parent company of Kraken crypto exchange, is moving further with long-nurtured IPO plans. Several signs hint that the public offering won’t be postponed this time.
Payward, the company behind Kraken which prepares to become one of rare publicly-traded crypto exchanges, has displayed a picture of financial health in Q1 2026, firmly setting its foundations for the IPO at an estimated $20B valuation.
In the first quarter of the current year, Payward reported $507 million in adjusted revenue (3% yearly growth). The platform’s futures trading activity rose 51% year-on-year, while assets stored on the crypto exchange increased 11% to $40 billion and funded accounts grew 47% to 6.1 million. One of the important factors for exemplary growth is comapny’s recent M&A activity.
In the last few months, Kraken’s parent completed acquisitions of tokenization company Backed, token management platform Magna and derivatives exchange Bitnomial. It has also agreed to acquire Reap Technologies, a stablecoin payment fintech, for $600 million. Payward management believes this diversification of the revenue sources makes the business more resilient.
“The composition of our revenue is evolving in ways that strengthen our performance through market cycles. The integration of NinjaTrader and Breakout added meaningful new streams that do not move in lockstep with crypto asset prices, contributing to our outperformance relative to the broader market. Recent acquisitions of Backed, Magna, and Bitnomial extend this diversification further – across tokenization, token lifecycle management, and US derivatives – as they integrate into the platform. “
Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward
After the company has confirmed its IPO plans, Payward showed several signs of strategic restructuring towards broader digital asset infrastructure beyond crypto trading. To begin with, the exchange is increasingly tied to the fast-growing real-world asset (RWA) sector. Several industry reports now estimate that roughly 45% of new Kraken listings in 2026 are tied to RWA-related products or tokenization infrastructure.
It has recently secured a $200 million investment from German exchange operator Deutsche Börse Group and announced a strategic collaboration with Franklin Templeton to bring traditional financial products on-chain. The latter deal embeds tokenized equities, custody services, actively managed yield products, and institutional crypto liquidity in Kraken’s OTC and Prime offerings. Meanwhile, Kraken’s tokenized equities business grows through xStocks partnerships with Nasdaq and Deutsche Börse’s 360X platform.
Media reports also suggest that the crypto exchange is optimizing its internal structure through moderate job cuts ahead of the upcoming IPO that might arrive later this year or slip into early 2027 due to subdued digital asset prices and time needed to master AI capabilities, per some forecasts. Just as Block did earlier, the firm trims excess personnel due to the rollout of AI tools that boosted operational efficiency (though at much smaller scale about 5% of the workforce). The released capital liquidity might be used for planned regional expansion as well. Lately, Kraken has been striving for regulatory recognition such as a Federal Reserve master account in the U.S. and MiCA license in the EU. Its new target markets include Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Earlier acquisition of Bitnomial also enables Kraken to obtain three CFTC licenses required for U.S. crypto derivatives: DCM (Designated Contract Market, or exchange license), DCO (Derivatives Clearing Organization, or clearinghouse license), and FCM (Futures Commission Merchant, or broker license). This means not only regional but also product expansion might be at stake.
To handle the IPO preparations, Payward raised several funding rounds lately. In late 2025, there was a $800 million dual-tranche funding from Citadel Securities and other investors.
In 2025, Kraken generated $2.2B in adjusted revenue (+33% YoY) and $531M in adjusted EBITDA.
Kraken is not the first crypto exchange to go public. In 2025, Bullish, a cryptocurrency exchange backed by billionaire Peter Thiel had its IPO which briefly pushed the company’s market value close to $14 billion on debut trading. Gemini, which primarily operates as a cryptocurrency exchange, founded by the Winklevoss brothers, raised $425 million in an initial public offering the same year at a more modest valuation of roughly $3.3 billion.
Meanwhile, Coinbase became the first crypto exchange that went public in 2021 through a direct listing on Nasdaq instead of a traditional IPO. During early trading, Coinbase stock briefly exceeded $100 billion in market value, making it one of the most valuable publicly traded financial technology companies at the time.
