Co-CEO Arjun Sethi described the revenue mix as "more resilient," pointing to a deliberate shift away from trading fees toward custody, payments, yield products, and financing. For the full year 2025, Payward reported $2.2 billion in adjusted revenue (up 33% year-over-year), with non-trading sources accounting for 53% of income, the first time in company history that figure has crossed the halfway mark. Adjusted EBITDA for 2025 came in at $531 million, up 26% from the year before.

IPO Pushed Back, Valuation Compressed

Payward filed a confidential draft S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on November 19, 2025, initially targeting a first-quarter 2026 debut. That plan was paused in March 2026 as crypto markets sold off. Bloomberg has since reported the listing is now unlikely before 2027, though Kraken has not publicly confirmed that timeline.

The mixed signals from company leadership have drawn attention. As recently as mid-April 2026, Sethi told attendees at the Semafor World Economy event that the IPO remained "on track." Separately, at a Consensus event in Miami whose precise timing relative to the March 2026 pause has not been confirmed, Sethi said the company was "80% ready" to go public. Weeks after the April Semafor statement, the 2027 Bloomberg reports emerged.

The valuation story adds more complexity. In April 2026, Deutsche Börse purchased a $200 million secondary stake in Payward at a price implying a company valuation of roughly $13.3 billion. That figure sits well below the $20 billion valuation from the November 2025 fundraising round, a compression of about $6.7 billion in under six months. Several publicly listed crypto exchange peers reported losses in Q1 2026, adding to investor caution about the sector.

In May 2026, Payward cut approximately 150 positions, about 5% of its roughly 3,000-person workforce. A company spokesperson said Kraken "regularly reviews its structure to make sure it has the right team in place to grow and serve customers well."

A Holding Company Built for Scale

Payward now operates four consumer-facing brands: Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, and xStocks. These share liquidity, risk management, and compliance systems under a single holding structure. Sethi has framed the approach in direct terms: "Rather than forcing all users into a single 'Frankenstein' interface, Payward allows each product to be designed for specific customer segments."

The company has spent heavily to get there. Three acquisitions over the past year total roughly $2.65 billion: NinjaTrader (retail futures, $1.5 billion), Reap Technologies (stablecoin payments infrastructure, up to $600 million), and Bitnomial (digital asset derivatives, $550 million). Transaction volume across the Payward platform reached $2 trillion in 2025, up 34% year-over-year, with funded accounts growing 50% to 5.7 million. Platform assets under custody stood at $48.2 billion at the end of 2025, up 11% year-over-year.

What This Means Outside the United States

For readers in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, the most consequential development in this report may not be the IPO calendar. It is the Reap acquisition. Reap Technologies is a Hong Kong-based company that builds stablecoin-powered payment rails across corridors spanning Hong Kong, Singapore, and emerging markets in Southeast Asia. That footprint does not yet explicitly include South Asian corridors, but if Kraken deploys Reap's infrastructure for business-to-business settlement, developers across the broader region could gain access to API-connected cross-border payment paths that currently require navigating multiple intermediaries.

A separate partnership with MoneyGram more directly addresses South Asian and African readers. It gives Kraken users access to crypto-to-cash conversion at nearly 500,000 retail locations across 200 countries and territories. For users in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, India, and Pakistan, where crypto-to-fiat conversion infrastructure is fragmented, that off-ramp is already live.

The macro backdrop supports this direction. Total crypto remittance volumes are projected to reach $34.96 billion globally in 2026, up from $27.87 billion in 2025. Transaction costs on low-fee stablecoin networks have fallen to around 0.96% per transfer, putting them in direct competition with legacy wire services.

For Verse Press's core readership, the IPO process also carries regulatory signalling value. India is actively revising its crypto tax framework, and Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission has been formalising rules for digital asset platforms. A major exchange completing a US public listing and filing a fully audited S-1 would set credibility and compliance benchmarks that regulators in both countries are watching closely, giving the Kraken listing significance well beyond the exchange's own balance sheet.

Looking Ahead

Kraken's trajectory raises a question that matters beyond its own balance sheet: whether diversified, infrastructure-oriented revenue models can sustain crypto exchanges through market cycles that punish trading-fee dependence. Regional exchanges in South Asia and Africa that are trying to scale face the same structural challenge. Payward's multi-brand architecture and its push into payments, custody, and derivatives offer one possible answer, though the delayed IPO and compressed valuation suggest the market is still deciding how much that answer is worth.

Q1 2026 revenue figures and the "more resilient" characterization are sourced from The Block's reporting on co-CEO statements and have not appeared in an official Payward press release as of publication. The 2027 IPO timeline is drawn from Bloomberg reporting via Finance Magnates and has not been confirmed by Kraken.