Kraken parent boosts card capabilities in $600M Reap acquisition

Dive Brief:

Crypto exchange Kraken’s parent company Payward will acquire Hong Kong-based payments infrastructure platform Reap in a deal worth up to $600 million that’s expected to close in the second half of this year, according to an announcement Thursday.
The acquisition would give Payward an infrastructure for card issuance and stablecoin payments and accelerate the Kraken parent’s expansion across the Asia-Pacific region.
Reap will continue to operate as a stand-alone platform after the acquisition closes, and will maintain its current leadership, brand and go-to-market approach, the companies said Thursday.

Dive Insight:

Payward isn’t the only party to benefit geographically from the Reap tie-up. Joining Payward will help Reap expand into the U.S. and Europe through licenses the Kraken parent already holds. The companies together aim to extend stablecoin-powered payments infrastructure into high-growth markets across the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America, according to Thursday’s release.

“Finance is moving in one direction. Continuous markets. Programmable money. Autonomous execution. Stablecoins are the settlement substrate. AI agents are the new participants,” Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in a statement. “Reap is the payments layer for what comes next.”

Sethi noted that Reap’s platform integrates card networks, banking rails and blockchains on a single application programmable interface, and settles transactions in stablecoins.

“The infrastructure for that world has to be open, regulated and operational at global scale on Day 1,” Sethi said. “The next financial product will not be assembled. It will be deployed."

With the addition of Reap’s technology, customers will be able to embed card issuance, cross-border payments and stablecoin treasury services alongside Payward's already-existing capabilities, such as crypto trading, custody, tokenized assets and derivatives.

Reap nearly tripled its revenue and volumes last year, and expanded its licensing footprint to South America, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Daren Guo, said in a statement Thursday.

“What’s next is for us to connect stablecoin cards and payments to a full suite of crypto-native financial services to power scale, regulatory reach and distribution for our clients,” Guo said. “Joining Payward was a natural step to accelerate the future of finance and build category-disrupting offerings in web3, agentic commerce and more.”

Payward has quickly become one of the most acquisitive companies in the digital-asset space. The Reap acquisition marks the second $500 million-or-higher deal Payward has announced in the past month. The company in mid-April said it would buy the derivatives company Bitnomial in a deal worth up to $550 million.

Payward has made several other acquisitions during the second Trump administration, starting with futures platform NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion in March 2025. Last summer and fall, it continued with a string of purchases, including 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 last month the company has filed confidentially for an initial public offering.