Payward, the parent company of Kraken, reported $507 million in adjusted revenue for Q1 2026. That is up 3% from a year ago. It is also down from $628 million in Q4 2025. Both directions matter.
The quarter was brutal for crypto exchanges. Bitcoin dropped 22%. Total crypto market cap fell 23%. Industry-wide spot trading volume cratered 38%. Coinbase and Robinhood both reported trading revenue declines. Kraken grew.
The how matters more than the what.
Derivatives Carried the Quarter
Futures daily average revenue trades climbed 51% year-over-year. That is the standout number in the entire report. NinjaTrader, which Kraken acquired in 2024, and the Breakout derivatives platform drove most of that growth. Total trading volume across the platform hit $357 billion.
Spot market share told its own story. Kraken went from roughly 3.5% in mid-2025 to 5.2% by March 2026. In a quarter where most exchanges lost ground, gaining nearly two percentage points of spot share is not trivial. The $550 million Bitnomial acquisition in April gave Kraken all three CFTC-issued licenses needed for a full-stack U.S. derivatives business. That deal closed after Q1, so its revenue impact will not show until Q2 at the earliest.
The EBITDA Number Looks Terrible on Purpose
Adjusted EBITDA came in at $18 million. A year ago it was $168 million. That is an 89% drop. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi was blunt about it: the company chose to spend.
The spending list is long. Backed Finance for tokenized equities. Magna for token lifecycle management. Bitnomial for U.S. derivatives. Reap Technologies for stablecoin-to-card payments. Plus a Federal Reserve master account approved in March, making Kraken one of the first crypto-native firms with direct access to Fed payment rails.
“We’re not optimizing for today’s EBITDA. We’re building what we believe wins tomorrow,” Sethi said. That is either a disciplined long-term play or a justification for burning cash during a downturn. The next two quarters will tell which.
How Kraken Compares to Coinbase Right Now
The comparison is unavoidable. Coinbase posted a $394 million loss last quarter and cut 700 staff in early May. Robinhood’s crypto revenue fell too. Both companies are public, which means their numbers face quarterly scrutiny that Kraken, as a private company, can avoid.
Kraken’s funded accounts reached 6.1 million, up 47% from a year ago. Assets on platform hit $40 billion, up 11%. Those are strong growth metrics for a quarter where the market gave exchanges nothing to work with. But Coinbase still dwarfs Kraken in total volume, and the gap in institutional custody assets is even wider.
The IPO Question Gets Louder
Payward filed confidentially for an IPO in November 2025. Both Kraken and Ledger hired Wall Street banks for a public listing, but neither has gone public yet. Bloomberg reported last week that Kraken is now eyeing a 2027 debut instead. The same report said the company cut around 150 staff as it deployed AI tools across operations.
Deutsche Borse bought a 1.5% stake in Payward for $200 million in April, implying roughly $13.3 billion in equity value. That is below the $20 billion valuation from the November raise. Separately, Kraken raised over $1 billion in primary capital across the past year from Apollo, Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and others.
What to Watch Next
Three things will determine whether Kraken’s spending spree pays off. First, the Bitnomial integration. If U.S. derivatives volume ramps through Q2, the 51% futures growth could accelerate. Second, the Reap acquisition, which connects stablecoins to card networks. That deal is expected to close in H2 2026 and could open a non-trading revenue stream that no other major exchange has. Third, the IPO timing. Every quarter the listing slips, the spending burn matters more.
The broader exchange landscape is splitting. Some operators are cutting costs and retreating to core trading. Coinbase’s CEO sold $550 million in stock while his company reported a loss. Kraken is doing the opposite: spending aggressively into a down market, betting that the infrastructure it buys now will generate revenue when volumes return. One of those strategies will look brilliant in two years. The other will look reckless.
