Overview
- Nasdaq Ventures agreed to a $100 million strategic investment that valued Payward at about $21 billion and deepened work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens for a planned Q2 2027 rollout.
- Payward has completed large regulated deals including NinjaTrader ($1.5 billion), Bitnomial (up to $550 million) and Reap (up to $600 million) to add derivatives, clearing and payments capabilities to the group.
- The company reported 2025 adjusted revenue of $2.2 billion with a majority of revenue from asset-based services and posted $508 million in second-quarter 2026 adjusted revenue as trading fees fell and asset services rose.
- Payward is productizing Kraken’s stack as Payward Services and has at least 25 external partners building on its APIs while its xStocks tokenized-equities product has shown roughly $25 billion of cumulative transactions and about $4 billion settled onchain.
- Payward’s near-term priorities include integrating acquisitions, rolling out issuer-backed tokenized equities with exchange partners and resolving cross-jurisdictional governance and regulatory questions while keeping an IPO off the table until at least Q2 2027.