BNY Talks Infrastructure Deal With Kraken Parent Payward
The talks are said to cover custody, payments, and trading through Payward Services. For Kraken, this fits into a broader tie-up with Nasdaq and other institutional players.
Key Takeaways
- BNY is in talks with Payward, Kraken’s parent company, about a broad partnership around crypto and market infrastructure.
- The possible deal could include crypto products, custody, wealth management, trading, payments, and infrastructure.
- Payward is expanding through acquisitions and partnerships as the line between crypto and traditional financial infrastructure keeps getting blurrier.
BNY is in talks with Payward, the Wyoming-based parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, about a broad partnership around crypto and financial market infrastructure. According to two people familiar with the matter, the deal could involve crypto products, custody, wealth management, trading, payments, and infrastructure. The talks are still ongoing, and there is no guarantee a deal will happen.
Broad Partnership Takes Shape
The possible agreement would run through Payward Services, the company’s business-to-business platform for banks, exchanges, and asset managers. That would make the deal broader than just a standard partnership around trading or custody. Part of the setup would resemble the infrastructure side of Payward’s recent agreement with Nasdaq, according to one of the people involved.
BNY, formerly Bank of New York Mellon, is one of the world’s biggest custody banks and serves institutional clients with custody, asset servicing, clearing, and wealth management. That makes the talks relevant to how traditional financial firms and crypto companies are increasingly linking up their services.
Payward Keeps Expanding
For Payward, a possible deal with BNY fits into a broader strategy to connect its crypto business with established financial institutions. The company behind Kraken already offers spot crypto, derivatives, tokenized equities, custody, staking, and payments, along with infrastructure for banks, fintechs, brokerages, and payment companies.
That expansion comes on top of recent acquisitions. In April, Payward bought the U.S. crypto derivatives firm Bitnomial for up to $550 million (€490 million), and followed that with a $600 million (€535 million) deal for stablecoin payments company Reap. Before that, it acquired retail futures platform NinjaTrader in 2025 for about $1.5 billion (€1.3 billion).
Why This Matters for Europe
For European crypto watchers, this shows how quickly the line between crypto and traditional market infrastructure is fading. BNY has also previously worked on tokenized deposits for near real-time settlement between institutional parties, while Payward is continuing to build tokenized equities together with Nasdaq. These kinds of links could matter for how institutional crypto services become part of broader financial markets.
