Payward, Kraken's Parent Firm, Posts 33% Revenue Surge Amid Cryptocurrency Trading Boom
The parent company of Kraken announced a 33% revenue increase to $2.2 billion for 2025, driven primarily by robust performance in trading and asset management operations alongside strategic acquisitions.
Payward, the parent entity behind cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, posted a 33% increase in revenue throughout 2025, driven by elevated transaction activity and strategic benefits from multiple business acquisitions.
Last year saw the firm's revenues climb to $2.2 billion, compared with $1.6 billion recorded in 2024, attributed to "broad-based performance across trading and asset-based businesses," while total transaction volumes experienced a 34% surge throughout the year reaching $2 billion, according to Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi in a Tuesday report.
Sethi noted that the revenue streams demonstrated strong diversification, described as "well balanced," with approximately 47% derived from trading-based operations and 53% originating from asset-based activities and other revenue sources.
These financial results emerge as market participants monitor developments surrounding Kraken's anticipated public debut, following the firm's confidential submission for an initial public offering back in November.
Acquisitions helped diversify income
According to Sethi, the various acquisitions completed by Payward throughout 2025 contributed significantly to revenue expansion, with the company drawing lessons from technology industry leaders like Meta and Amazon by segmenting its product offerings to maximize utilization, enabling "each product to be designed for a specific customer segment."
Throughout the previous year, Payward completed acquisitions of futures trading platform NinjaTrader, proprietary trading firm Breakout, derivatives trading platform Small Exchange, and trading automation software provider Capitalise.ai.
Additionally, Payward completed the acquisition of Backed in the previous month, a firm operating within the tokenized securities sector that powers the widely-used xStocks platform.
According to Sethi, these strategic acquisitions, particularly NinjaTrader and Breakout, resulted in a substantial 119% increase in daily average revenue trades.
The financial report further indicated that total assets held on the platform experienced an 11% growth to $48.2 billion, while the number of funded accounts expanded by 50% to reach 5.7 million, Sethi noted.
Looking toward the future, Sethi emphasized that Payward's strategic approach centers on "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 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.