Payward closes $600 million acquisition of Reap

• Key insight: Kraken's parent company just finished acquiring a stablecoin-powered credit card and payments fintech.
• Expert quote: Coin Bureau founder Nic Puckrin said that Payward is "broadening out to capture a bigger share of the market" as crypto exchanges are experiencing a "challenging environment."
• Forward look: Payward is still awaiting a response from the OCC to its national trust bank charter application filed in May.

Kraken's parent company, Payward, has completed its acquisition of the stablecoin fintech Reap.

The acquisition, which was first announced in May, expands Payward's B2B infrastructure platform for issuing cards and stablecoin payments. The deal is priced at up to $600 million pending earn outs, a company representative told American Banker, and it places Payward's total equity at $20 billion.

Payward closed the deal as it awaits a national trust bank charter approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The charter application, filed shortly after the Reap deal was first announced, is part of Payward's efforts to build a federally supervised digital-asset infrastructure, co-CEO of Payward and Kraken Arjun Sethi said at the time.

"We are building the rails for an open, global financial system, where stablecoins are the settlement medium and tokenized assets are the native collateral underneath every transaction," Sethi said in a statement regarding the deal's closing.

Payward Services, the company's B2B platform, offers enterprise customers tools for various digital asset services such as crypto trading and tokenized assets. Stablecoin-based treasury management capabilities are now also part of the platform through Reap.

"We're at an inflection point where fiat and crypto rails are merging into a single global payments layer, and that creates new and disruptive opportunities in cards and payments," said Reap co-founder Daren Guo. "With Payward, we can bring that to more markets, more partners, and power the agentic payment flows that will define the next generation of embedded card issuance and financial operations."

Reap will continue to operate as a standalone brand within Payward, according to a company statement, maintaining its brand and leadership team under Payward's global infrastructure and regulatory footprint.

Nic Puckrin, cross-asset analyst and founder of Coin Bureau, told American Banker that the Reap acquisition is one piece of a bigger puzzle for Kraken's parent company.

"The finished product is a financial company with a much broader proposition than it started with," he said. "We've seen many others in both the fintech and crypto spaces making similar moves. Stripe's acquisition of Bridge or Ripple buying Hidden Road are good examples, [and] the two industries are converging quite rapidly now."

Puckrin noted that the deal's closing is an expansion of Payward's capabilities, particularly for payments and treasury services, even as it awaits a national charter.

"Without Reap and the charter, it's mostly just a crypto infrastructure business," he said. "Add Reap and the charter, and it becomes an institutional financial infrastructure provider offering custody, payments, settlements and treasury services. That's the end goal."

He also said that Reap doesn't really overlap with Kraken directly. "It's more about continuously broadening out to capture a bigger share of the market — especially at a time when the environment for crypto exchanges is challenging," he said.