Kraken Parent Payward to Acquire Hong Kong's Reap for $600M

Payward Inc., the parent of Kraken, agreed to acquire Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments firm Reap Technologies for $600 million in cash and stock — its first infrastructure deal in Asia and its third-largest acquisition overall. The deal is funded through a mix of cash and newly issued Payward shares priced at a $20 billion valuation, co-CEO Arjun Sethi told Bloomberg.

Reap provides stablecoin-based cross-border and business-to-business payment services, connecting traditional financial rails with digital-asset settlement for cross-border money flows. It is led by Daren Guo, who previously built Stripe's Asia Pacific business, and former investment banker Kevin Kang. New products expected from the combination include card issuance and stablecoin payments, slotting into a B2B infrastructure platform Payward launched this year that serves fintechs, banks, brokerages and crypto-accepting merchants.

Why it matters

The acquisition extends a Payward deal run that has now cost the company upwards of $2.6 billion across three headline transactions alone: the $1.5 billion NinjaTrader retail-futures deal last year, the up-to-$550 million Bitnomial derivatives acquisition that closed days earlier, and now Reap. The cadence is reshaping Payward from a pure-play crypto exchange operator into a multi-venue financial-infrastructure company spanning retail futures, regulated derivatives, tokenized assets and — with Reap — Asia-facing stablecoin payments.

Asia is now Payward's fastest-growing market outside Europe, according to Sethi, who cited both platform revenue and assets on platform. The Reap deal gives Payward an immediate B2B payments anchor in Hong Kong without building from scratch, and gives Reap's clients a regulated US parent with a pending IPO.

Market impact

Payward reported $2.2 billion in adjusted revenue for 2025 and confidentially filed for an IPO late last year, meaning the M&A run is happening against a public-market backdrop that will price every deal against an eventual listing valuation. The $20 billion share-print valuation cited for this transaction provides the cleanest read on where Payward itself is being marked.