Kraken parent Payward to buy stablecoin payments firm Reap for $600m

Payward, the parent of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, has agreed to acquire Hong Kong based Reap Technologies for up to $600 million in cash and stock. Reap is a stablecoin-native payments infrastructure company whose API enables corporate card issuance, cross border payouts and treasury management. By mid 2025 Reap said it was processing $3 billion in monthly transaction volume, with more recent disclosures referring only to “billions” in stablecoin-funded flows.

The deal is the latest in a rapid acquisition spree by Payward, which has spent roughly $2.7 billion in about a year assembling a full stack financial infrastructure platform. Previous deals include NinjaTrader (futures trading), Bitnomial (CFTC regulated perpetuals and clearing), and Backed (tokenized equities powering Kraken’s xStocks product). With an IPO in the works, Payward also received a $200 million investment from Deutsche Börse in April and raised $800 million in November 2025 at a $20 billion valuation, with Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital and Citadel Securities among the investors.

Payward has been quietly building payments infrastructure alongside the more visible exchange and derivatives acquisitions. Kraken subsidiary Payward Ireland received an EU electronic money institution (EMI) license from the Central Bank of Ireland in 2023. The company secured a second EMI license from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority in early 2025. And in March, Kraken Financial, a Wyoming chartered special purpose depository institution, became the first digital asset bank to receive a Federal Reserve account. Fed Vice Chair Bowman has indicated the limited purpose account is effectively a trial for the Fed’s proposed “skinny” payments account framework.

The Reap acquisition makes the strategy behind those moves considerably clearer.

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