Kraken Parent Payward in BNY Talks Covering Bitcoin (BTC) Custody Across Six Areas

Payward and BNY Hold Six-Area Partnership Talks

Kraken parent Payward has entered talks with BNY over a potential partnership spanning six areas: crypto products, custody, wealth management, trading, payments and financial infrastructure. The services under discussion could be delivered through Payward Services, the Wyoming-based company's platform for banks, exchanges and asset managers, and would extend digital-asset rails covering Bitcoin (BTC) custody and trading alongside payments. Institutional demand for regulated custody, a theme that carried through the last bull market, has kept custodians and exchange operators circling each other, and Bitcoin (BTC) price interest among banks has sharpened that dynamic this year. One person familiar with the discussions said parts of the outline resemble the infrastructure component of Payward's recent Nasdaq agreement, though the negotiations are private and incomplete. There is no guarantee the companies reach an agreement, and both Payward and BNY declined to comment. BNY, formerly Bank of New York Mellon and listed in New York under the ticker BK, provides custody, asset servicing, clearing and wealth management to institutional clients. Payward's own operations span spot crypto trading, derivatives, tokenized equities, custody, staking, payments and traditional securities, alongside its role running one of the best crypto exchanges.

Nasdaq Deal Sets the Infrastructure Template

The possible BNY arrangement would land on top of an eventful stretch for Payward. In September, Nasdaq Ventures agreed to invest $100 million in Payward at a reported $21 billion valuation, with the announcement setting out three components: the investment, joint work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens and adoption of Nasdaq's market-surveillance technology across Payward's crypto, equities, tokenized-equities, futures and options venues. Both companies expect the equity tokens to launch in the second quarter of 2027, connecting Nasdaq's regulated markets with Payward's xStocks ecosystem while preserving shareholder rights and issuer control, and Wells Fargo acted as exclusive capital markets adviser on the transaction. Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi described the planned infrastructure as rails that do not close, with shareholder rights intact. Acquisitions have widened the platform in parallel: the Bitnomial purchase, announced in April for up to $550 million, closed on May 1 and brought a designated contract market, a derivatives clearing organization and a futures commission merchant under one roof, enabling regulated contract trading within the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's framework. The Reap stablecoin-payments deal, announced at $600 million, closed on July 1, following the roughly $1.5 billion NinjaTrader acquisition in 2025. Payward has also pushed its planned initial public offering to the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.

BNY's Tokenized Deposit Program

BNY brings its own digital-asset groundwork to the table. In its January 9 announcement, the bank described the first step of a deposit-tokenization program that creates blockchain records mirroring participating clients' existing deposit balances, beginning with collateral and margin workflows. Those digital entries represent clients' demand deposit claims against BNY and run on a private, permissioned blockchain, while balances continue to appear in the bank's traditional systems for regulatory and reporting purposes. The bank has framed rules-based, near-real-time cash movement as a future objective for institutional clients. The same statement included support from ICE's clearing leadership, which said it was preparing for 24-hour trading and the potential use of tokenized collateral across its clearinghouses, and carried comments from Citadel Securities, Invesco and WisdomTree on the deposit program itself, separate from the reported Payward negotiations. Payward has been building the retail side of the stack too: its asset purchase of Magic Labs' wallet business covered technology that had supported more than 60 million crypto wallets and over $10 billion in stablecoin volume, with financial terms undisclosed. Second-quarter results, disclosed Aug. 14, showed $508 million in adjusted revenue, up 17% year over year, $23 million in adjusted EBITDA and platform transaction volume down 18% to $310 billion.

Custody and Settlement Rails Converge

The three threads meet at the same gap: settlement between crypto-native platforms and traditional custodians. The BNY announcement is explicit about both its terms and its limits, since deposit records are live only for collateral and margin workflows while near-real-time cash movement remains a stated objective, not a shipped product. The Payward-BNY talks carry no disclosed scope, timeline or financial terms, and both companies declined comment, so any wider integration stays unconfirmed for now. Nasdaq's $100 million investment shows the template works with an exchange operator, but transferring it to a custodian of BNY's scale is a separate, unsigned step. COINOTAG's read: treat the Nasdaq deal as proven and the BNY talks as optionality until terms appear in writing.