By Arjun Sethi, Kraken co-CEO

Kraken was founded 15 years ago as a high-performance crypto exchange built for professional traders. From the beginning, the company focused on deep liquidity, reliable execution, and infrastructure capable of operating through extreme market volatility.

That operating philosophy shaped how the business evolved from exchange to financial infrastructure. Rather than expanding by layering independent products or systems, Kraken invested in shared infrastructure: unified liquidity, centralized risk management, and a global compliance framework that could support multiple asset classes and client segments simultaneously.

Over time, this approach transformed the company from a single-product exchange into a multi-business financial platform spanning trading, custody, payments, yield, lending, and market data across both digital and traditional assets.

Today, Kraken is no longer a single-brand company. It is part of a broader financial organization built on one unified infrastructure layer.

Introducing Payward; learning from the great infrastructure platforms

There is a well-established pattern in the history of enduring platform companies. The most durable companies did not scale by forcing every customer into a single interface or experience. They scaled by building a shared infrastructure layer that enabled multiple products to exist independently while compounding value at the system level.

After World War II, industrial and financial leaders learned that efficiency and resilience came from standardization underneath, not uniformity on the surface. As markets globalized and customer needs diverged, a winning model became shared infrastructure with differentiated distribution.

Modern technology companies followed the same arc.

Amazon began as a retail marketplace, but its long-term advantage came from building logistics, fulfillment, and computing infrastructure that could be reused across many businesses. AWS was not created as a feature. It was created as a platform with near-zero marginal cost to serve additional workloads once the core system was in place.

Alphabet evolved by separating core infrastructure from product expression. Search, YouTube, Android, and Cloud all run on shared data, compute, and identity layers, allowing innovation at the edge without fragmentation at the core.

Meta built a family of products on a single identity, data, and monetization graph. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger serve different user behaviors, geographies, and use cases, yet compound engagement and economics because they share the same underlying systems.

Payward follows this same model in financial services.

Why Payward exists

Payward is the unified infrastructure layer that powers Kraken and a growing family of products, including NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, and future platforms yet to be launched.

Rather than forcing all users into a single “Frankenstein” interface, Payward allows each product to be designed for a specific customer segment, regulatory regime, and use case, while sharing:

• One global liquidity pool
• One risk and margin engine
• One collateral and settlement system
• One compliance and licensing framework

This approach is not just cleaner from a product standpoint. We believe it is mathematically superior.

Once the infrastructure is built, the marginal cost of launching and operating additional products approaches zero relative to the value they add. Each new surface increases total throughput, assets on platform, and liquidity depth without duplicating risk, capital, or regulatory effort.

Serving a segmented global market

Financial services are inherently segmented. Retail consumers, professional traders, institutions, enterprises, and regional markets all require different interfaces, workflows, and regulatory treatments.

Trying to serve all of them through a single UI degrades the experience for everyone.

Payward’s model allows Kraken to meet customers where they are:

• Consumer products optimized for simplicity and trust
• Pro platforms optimized for execution and control
• Institutional offerings optimized for scale, reporting, and governance
• Region-specific products tailored to local payment rails and regulations

All of this operates on the same global system, across more than 190 countries and territories and over 100 licenses.

We believe this enables growth by lowering friction, increasing capital efficiency, and expanding access to modern financial infrastructure.

The strategic outcome

By separating infrastructure from product expression, Payward ensures that innovation does not come at the expense of control, risk discipline, or regulatory integrity.

As the world of financial services continues to fragment by geography, regulation, and user behavior, we believe this model allows Kraken to scale responsibly, launch faster, and compound value at the platform level.

Payward is not a holding company in name only. It is the system that allows Kraken to behave like infrastructure rather than an app.

Payward is the parent entity and operating platform that powers Kraken and an expanding family of complementary products.

The name Payward, chosen at the company’s founding, reflects a long-standing commitment to moving finance forward toward a more open, efficient, and globally accessible financial system. Historically, Payward operated largely behind the scenes as the legal and technical foundation of Kraken.

Beginning in 2025, Payward has taken on a more explicit role as the infrastructure layer that powers multiple product surfaces and interfaces.

Payward’s platform spans:

• High-performance exchange technology
• Deeply pooled global liquidity
• Unified risk and margin systems
• Shared compliance and regulatory infrastructure
• A broad portfolio of licenses across crypto, payments, trading, and custody

This superinfrastructure allows Payward to launch and operate distinct products rapidly, at low marginal cost, while compounding liquidity, assets on platform, and engagement across the entire ecosystem.

Kraken remains the flagship multi-asset platform, but Payward’s infrastructure also powers:

• NinjaTrader, a leading retail futures platform
• CF Benchmarks, a global index and reference data provider
• Breakout, a crypto-native proprietary trading and evaluation platform
• xStocks, a global tokenized equities platform

Payward provides a consolidated view of the platform that underpins all of these products. Kraken is not going away. It remains the primary consumer and institutional brand. Going forward, ecosystem-wide announcements and platform updates will be communicated through www.payward.com.

Product and platform expansion in 2025

This was a year defined not just by expansion, but by execution. We shipped across the entire product suite – launching, scaling, and integrating at a pace that reflected both operational maturity and long-term conviction. Growth was fueled by strong core product momentum and meaningful contributions from recent acquisitions. Over the course of the year, we enhanced our core experiences, introduced entirely new interfaces, expanded our reach through new geos, asset classes, licensing, and more.

Consumer

Payward expanded its consumer footprint with products designed to grow assets on platform and extend everyday financial use cases:

• Krak App and Krak Card, a global money app for payments, savings, and spending, launched in partnership with Mastercard
• Kraken+, a premium subscription offering
• Bundles, enabling simplified portfolio diversification

Professional traders

• Kraken VIP, a high-touch service model for ultra-high-net-worth clients
• Kraken Pro reached baseline round-trip latencies below 2ms for the first time with VPC peering with AWS and DC3 with Beeks.
• Launched new Github REST and WebSocket SDKs for spot and futures to improve developer and integration experience.
• Launched FIX API for both spot and futures trading, enabling robust and standardized connectivity for the largest institutions and intermediaries.
• Kraken Pro launched Unified Wallet to consolidate spot, margin, and futures balances for cross margining for capital efficiency.
• Increased leverage for margin trading up to 10x for larger exposure and dynamic rates to better price products during volatile markets.
• Launched Kraken Market Participation Program to incentivize activity from trading firms.
• New order types with OCO and FOK for more order customization.
• Ninja Trader launched Ninja Trader Prop and Tradovate Prop, giving traders a toolkit for every stage of their prop journey

Institutional and B2B

Payward extended its infrastructure into institutional and embedded finance use cases:

• Kraken Embed and Kraken Ramp, enabling Crypto-as-a-Service for B2B partners
• Kraken Prime, a full-service prime brokerage offering custody, trading, and financing
• CME Group launches Solana Futures, based on CF Benchmarks’ regulated SOL Reference Rate
• CME announces XRP futures, based on CF Benchmarks’ XRPUSD_RR index

Geographic and expansion and new asset classes

• Launched tokenized equities with xStocks in 100+ countries, going live in Europe in September 2025
• Launched U.S.-listed stock and ETF trading
• Launched U.S. regulated crypto futures for U.S. Clients
• Rolled-out MiFID-regulated futures in Europe
• Expanded CME contract support on Kraken Pro including commodities like oil and gold
• Advanced regulatory expansion by extending Kraken Custody into Europe under MiCA registration, reinforcing Kraken’s global leadership in compliant, institutional-grade custody
• Launched local banking rails in Colombia, Argentina and Mexico, integrated Pix in Brazil

Regulatory and policy leadership

Payward continued to build one of the industry’s most comprehensive regulatory footprints:

• Secured MiCA approval from the Central Bank of Ireland
• Obtained a MiFID license in the EU
• Secured an EMI license in the UK
• Actively engaged with policymakers, regulators and industry stakeholders across the world to support the creation of durable regulatory frameworks

This regulatory foundation enables Payward to support multiple asset classes and client segments within local frameworks while operating on a shared global platform.

M&A and strategic growth

In 2025, Payward executed a disciplined M&A strategy focused on completing and extending its infrastructure:

• NinjaTrader, accelerating Payward’s evolution into a multi-asset, professional trading platform
• Breakout, enabling evaluation-based proprietary trading and capital access
• Small Exchange, enhancing Payward’s U.S. derivatives infrastructure under CFTC regulation
• Capitalise.ai, enabling no-code trading automation

In January 2026, Payward closed the acquisition of Backed, fully verticalizing the xStocks platform by integrating issuance, trading, and settlement into a single system.

Financial performance

2025 established a new baseline for Payward’s scale and earnings power. Adjusted revenue reached $2.2 billion, representing 33% year-over-year growth, driven by broad-based performance across trading and asset-based businesses.

Adjusted EBITDA totaled $531 million, up 26% year-over-year, reflecting meaningful operating leverage inherent in the unified platform.

Revenue was well balanced, with approximately 47% from trading-based revenue and 53% from asset-based and other revenue. Trading revenue was supported by deep liquidity and sustained engagement, while asset-based revenue scaled with assets on platform through custody, yield, payments, and financing.

Total platform transaction volume reached $2.0 trillion, up 34% year-over-year. Assets on platform increased to $48.5 billion, up 12% year-over-year. Funded accounts grew to 5.7 million, a 50% increase versus 2024. Futures DARTs rose 119%, driven by NinjaTrader and Breakout integration and expanded futures offerings.

**Q4 2025 resilience **

Q4 2025 demonstrated the resilience of Payward’s infrastructure during heightened volatility. Despite industry-wide softness, the platform generated $625 million in adjusted revenue and $84 million in adjusted EBITDA.

During October’s historic liquidation event, in which more than $19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated across the industry in roughly 24 hours, Payward’s platform operated without disruption. Execution quality, risk systems, and liquidity held up precisely as designed.

Transparency through Proof of Reserves

Payward completed its latest quarterly Proof of Reserves as of December 31, 2025. Clients can independently verify that their assets are fully backed on-chain and included in the report, which is validated by a third-party accounting firm.

Kraken pioneered regular Proof of Reserves and remains one of the few platforms to conduct this process consistently.

Looking ahead

Payward enters the next phase of its evolution with a clear objective: to increase throughput on a unified global financial infrastructure while preserving the risk, trust, and regulatory invariants that define the platform.

The company’s strategy is not driven by adding standalone products or chasing short-term cycles. It is driven by compounding efficiency across a single system. As assets on platform grow, collateral becomes more productive. As liquidity deepens, trading volume scales without requiring higher take rates. As settlement, custody, and payments converge on the same rails, new asset classes can be introduced without fragmenting risk or operations.

In practical terms, we believe the next phase of growth will come from three reinforcing vectors.

First, expanding the set of assets that can operate natively on the platform. Crypto was the first asset class to move onto programmable, always-on rails. Tokenized equities, FX, futures, and real-world assets extend that same infrastructure into larger, more durable markets. Because Payward’s architecture is asset-agnostic, these additions increase platform throughput rather than complexity.

Second, increasing the productivity and duration of assets on platform. Custody, payments, yield, financing, and settlement activity allow balances to support multiple economic uses over time. This improves capital efficiency and drives a growing share of asset-based revenue that is less sensitive to trading volatility.

Third, global expansion that is additive rather than extractive. Payward is not replicating infrastructure market by market. A single global core supports localized onramps, compliance, and distribution. As adoption accelerates in regions where legacy financial rails are inefficient, the same platform enables new financial activity without requiring incremental reinvention.

Risk management remains central to this strategy. Margin will continue to be designed as a safety mechanism rather than a revenue lever. Positions remain fully collateralized, liquidation remains deterministic, and the platform will continue to prioritize predictable behavior under stress over peak-cycle optimization.

Looking forward, Payward’s focus is not on maximizing any single metric in isolation. It is on maximizing long-run, risk-adjusted throughput across a growing set of asset classes and geographies. The financial results in 2025 reflect the early stages of this compounding model. The years ahead are about scaling it responsibly.

Non-GAAP metrics

Adjusted Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA are non-GAAP financial measures used by Management internally to understand, manage, and evaluate the business and make operating decisions. We believe these measures provide additional insight into our operational performance and help facilitate comparisons for the period indicated. Adjusted revenue is total revenue in accordance with GAAP, less (i) trading costs and (ii) (Gain) loss on trading activities. We believe Adjusted Revenue allows for greater comparability to peer exchanges. Adjusted EBITDA is net income (loss), adjusted to exclude (i) other income (loss), net and other non-recurring items, (ii) (gain) loss on crypto, net, (iii) income tax expense, (iv) interest expense from financing activities, (v) depreciation and amortization, (vi) stock-based compensation expense, (vii) restructuring costs, (viii) transaction-related costs and (ix) non-recurring legal settlements. Adjusted EBITDA excludes irregular, non-recurring, and/or discretionary expenses and is intended to provide a clearer view of the company’s core profitability. Presented metrics include NinjaTrader starting from May 1, 2025 onward and Breakout from September 2025 onward. Prior periods have been revised to conform to current period presentation.

Key operating metrics

Total Platform Transaction Volume: Total platform transaction volume represents the aggregate notional value, expressed in U.S. dollar terms, of all transactions executed across the Company’s platforms during the period presented. This includes transaction activity in Spot, Margin, Consumer, OTC Spot, Equities, xStocks, Krak, Earn and Funding (across all platforms).

Assets on Platform (end of period): Total assets on platform represents the aggregate value, expressed in U.S. dollar terms, of assets held by the Company’s customers across all products and asset types, including crypto assets, equities and fiat currencies, measured as of the last day of the fiscal quarter. This metric includes assets held on the Company’s platforms as well as assets held through affiliated platforms, including NinjaTrader.

Funded Accounts (end of period): Funded accounts represent the total number of distinct customer accounts across the Company’s platforms and products that maintained a balance greater than zero as of the last day of the fiscal quarter. Sub-accounts are counted as separate accounts for purposes of this metric. Total funded accounts include accounts held through affiliated platforms, including NinjaTrader.

Futures Daily Average Revenue Trades (DARTs): Futures DARTs represents daily average revenue trades across TradFi futures and perpetual crypto futures, calculated as: total number of futures trades/trading days.

Trading days: Trading days are calculated as the total number of calendar days in the quarter.

The information provided in this communications is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any token, security or financial instrument. It is not intended as, and shall not be relied upon as, investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.