Kraken’s parent Payward agreed to acquire Hong Kong-based Reap Technologies for $600 million on May 7. Cash and stock, with the stock priced at a $20 billion valuation. Reap builds stablecoin-powered B2B payment rails: corporate Visa cards funded by USDC, cross-border settlement APIs, and treasury tools for companies moving money between Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
This is Payward’s third headline acquisition in 18 months. NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion. Bitnomial for $550 million. Now Reap for $600 million. Total: $2.65 billion. The company is not building a bigger exchange. It is building a financial services conglomerate.
Reap was profitable before the acquisition. On $60 million in total funding.
That is the number that stands out. Reap nearly tripled its revenue in 2025 and was already in the black. Most crypto infrastructure companies burn through hundreds of millions before breaking even. Reap did it on $60 million total raised. The company was founded in 2018 by Daren Guo, who built Stripe’s Asia Pacific business, and Kevin Kang, a former investment banker.
The product stack is specific. Visa cards for businesses funded by USDC. Programmable payment APIs. Expense management tools. Cross-border settlement that connects fiat rails to stablecoin infrastructure. Licensed in Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico, and Brazil. Partnerships with Circle, Solana, and Visa. Reap CEO Guo told reporters the stablecoin card and payment sector has grown into an $18 billion annual industry.
Payward is not buying a prototype. It is buying a working business with revenue, regulatory licenses, and 22,000 corporate clients across four continents.
Bitnomial closed last week. Kraken launched CFTC-regulated trading the next day.
The timing matters. Payward completed the Bitnomial acquisition on May 4 and immediately launched CFTC-regulated spot margin trading on Kraken using the licenses it just acquired. Bitnomial was the first crypto-native platform to hold all three CFTC licenses: designated contract market, derivatives clearing organization, and futures commission merchant.
Three days later, Reap. The pace tells you this is not opportunistic deal-making. Payward has a list. NinjaTrader gave it retail futures. Bitnomial gave it a full CFTC stack. Reap gives it stablecoin payment rails in Asia. Each deal fills a specific gap in a single platform vision.
Co-CEO Arjun Sethi framed it at Consensus Miami this week: “Finance is moving in one direction. Continuous markets. Programmable money. Autonomous execution. Stablecoins are the settlement substrate. AI agents are the new participants.” That is not exchange talk. That is infrastructure talk.
The $20 billion valuation keeps showing up
The stock issued in both the Bitnomial and Reap deals values Payward at $20 billion. That is the same number from the $800 million funding round in November 2025, right before the company filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC. In March, Payward paused its IPO plans citing market conditions. Sethi said this week the company is “80% ready” to go public.
Using the same valuation across multiple deals is a signal. Payward wants to establish $20 billion as the floor before it prices shares publicly. Every acquisition paid partly in stock at that number reinforces it with counterparties, investors, and eventually the public market.
For context, Coinbase’s market cap sits around $42 billion. Coinbase acquired Deribit for $2.9 billion last year. The regulatory environment is the most favorable crypto has had, and both companies are using the window to acquire rather than build.
Asia is the fastest-growing market. Payward just bought its way in.
Sethi told Bloomberg that outside Europe, Asia is Payward’s fastest-growing market in both revenue and assets on platform. Hong Kong’s evolving stablecoin licensing regime and Singapore’s established fintech framework make the region attractive for a company that wants to do more than trade tokens.
The stablecoin market just hit $321 billion. Tether, Circle, and a wave of new entrants are competing to become the default settlement layer for global B2B payments. Owning the payment rails is the bet. Not the exchange, not the token, the rails.
Reap will operate as a standalone brand within Payward. Same team, same product, same go-to-market. But now with access to Kraken’s liquidity, custody, and 1,900 existing B2B partners. Closing is expected in the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approvals in Hong Kong and Singapore.
