Kraken has agreed to buy Bitnomial, a derivatives company, in a deal worth up to $550 million that’s expected to close by June, the crypto exchange announced Friday.
“The shape of a market is determined by its clearing infrastructure [and] the U.S. has had no clearing infrastructure built for digital assets,” Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in a statement Friday. “Bitnomial spent a decade building … capabilities that cannot be retrofitted onto legacy systems.
“That is the regulated foundation we are adding … starting with spot margin, perpetuals, and options for US clients under CFTC regulation,” Sethi added.
Bitnomial bills itself as the first crypto-native business in the U.S. to hold all three Commodity Futures Trading Commission-issued licenses required to operate an exchange, a clearinghouse and a brokerage.
“Bitnomial was built on a simple conviction: that the future of derivatives is digital-asset-native, and that the U.S. should lead it, not follow it,” the business’s founder and CEO, Luke Hoersten, said Friday in a statement. “Joining Payward [Kraken’s parent company] means we can now build that future at the scale it deserves.”
Kraken has made several acquisitions during the second Trump administration, starting with futures platform NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion in March 2025. It continued that trend through the summer and fall, buying no-code trading platform Capitalise.ai in August, multi-asset investment platform Breakout in September, derivatives platform Small Exchange in October and tokenized equities firm Backed in December.
More recently, Kraken became the first crypto firm to receive a master account with the Federal Reserve. Sethi confirmed this week the company has filed confidentially for an initial public offering.
The Bitnomial transaction values Payward’s equity at $20 million.
The companies tout the acquisition as one that “opens a new channel for partners, including fintechs, banks, brokerages and payment providers to offer regulated U.S. derivatives products to their own end users through a single integration.”
Buying Bitnomial adds regulated U.S. derivatives to a stable of capabilities that includes crypto trading, tokenized equities staking and on/off-ramps, Kraken said.
As for the future Hoersten is hinting at, Bitnomial, in the release, said it envisions “crypto-settled products, tokenized assets and eventually the kind of continuous, capital-efficient contracts that have transformed global markets.”
