BNY in Talks With Kraken Parent Payward on Digital Asset Partnership: Report

BNY is in talks with Payward, the Wyoming-based parent of crypto exchange Kraken, over a broad partnership spanning digital assets and financial-market infrastructure, reportedly first reported by two people familiar with the matter. Both companies declined to comment, and there is no guarantee an agreement will be reached.

The timing stands out. Payward has pushed its planned initial public offering to the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest, after shelving the listing during difficult market conditions. Every institutional agreement it has signed this year lines up against that window.

In September, Nasdaq Ventures agreed to invest $100 million in Payward at a $21 billion valuation, alongside an expanded collaboration on tokenized equities. Under that deal, Payward will connect Nasdaq’s tokenized equities framework to its xStocks infrastructure, adopt Nasdaq’s market-surveillance technology across its trading venues, and target a launch of Nasdaq Equity Tokens in the second quarter of 2027. The same quarter as the IPO.

September also brought an agreement with SoFi covering banking, payments, liquidity and digital assets, including access to Kraken Prime and SoFi’s real-time settlement network. Before that came a buying spree: a deal to acquire US crypto derivatives firm Bitnomial for as much as $550 million in April, followed by a $600 million agreement for stablecoin-payments company Reap. Those follow the approximately $1.5 billion acquisition of retail futures platform NinjaTrader in 2025.

BNY has been building its own digital-asset infrastructure, including tokenized deposits designed to support near-real-time onchain settlement between institutions, so the two sides would meet on shared ground. One person familiar with the talks said elements of a potential agreement could resemble the infrastructure component of the Nasdaq deal.

Per the people familiar, a prospective agreement could cover crypto products, custody, wealth management, trading, payments and the B2B infrastructure Payward sells to banks, exchanges and asset managers through its Payward Services platform. The scope and any financial terms are not set, and it is unclear whether the arrangement would include an equity component similar to the Nasdaq investment.

The SPAC vehicle affiliated with Kraken that filed for a $250 million Nasdaq listing in January shows how long the exchange’s public-market ambitions have been building, across more than one route.