Kraken owner Payward has agreed to acquire Bitnomial in a deal worth up to $550 million in cash and stock, giving tight control over the fully licensed US cryptocurrency derivatives portfolio as it expands deeper into regulated markets.
the practical Payward is valued at $20 billion expected To close in the first half of 2026, subject to customary conditions and regulatory filings with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Petnomial It stands out as the first crypto-native platform in the US to secure all three licenses required to operate a full financial derivatives business: Designated Futures Market, Derivatives Clearing Organization, and Futures Commission Dealer. These approvals allow it to operate an exchange, clear trades, and provide brokerage services within a single regulated framework.
By acquiring Bitnomial, Payward gains infrastructure that could take years to build. The exchange has spent more than a decade developing a system designed for digital assets, including cryptocurrency settlement, cryptocurrency collateral, and continuous trading. The deal establishes this foundation within the Payward ecosystem, which includes Kraken and recently acquired futures platform NinjaTrader.
Clearing infrastructure shapes how markets work, said Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Payward, pointing to settlement systems and margin models as the core of derivatives innovation. He said the United States lacked a clearing infrastructure designed for digital assets, which made the Bitnomial platform a strategic target.
Bitnomial founder Luke Hoersten said the company built its exchange and clearinghouse from the ground up for cryptocurrency markets. He pointed to features such as perpetual futures, cryptocurrency settlement products, and a unified trading ledger across spot, futures, and options as capabilities that legacy systems cannot support without a redesign.
Busy Kraken week
The acquisition expands Payward’s push into derivatives, a sector that has become central to cryptocurrency trading volumes. While Kraken remains a major exchange, it lags behind some global competitors in spot trading and is focused on building derivatives and multi-asset capabilities through acquisitions.
The company’s biggest move came in 2025 at $1.5 billion buying From NinjaTrader, giving it a foothold in the US futures markets and access to a large base of retail traders. The Bitnomial deal builds on that strategy by adding a fully regulated derivatives infrastructure layer.
The deal also strengthens Payward Services, the company’s enterprise infrastructure arm. Through a single API integration, banks, fintechs and brokerages will be able to offer US regulated derivatives alongside services such as cryptocurrency trading, staking and tokenized stocks.
Payward framed the transaction as an infrastructure play rather than a traditional acquisition, positioning Bitnomial’s regulatory group as a foundation for building the next phase of US cryptocurrency derivatives markets.
Earlier this week, Deutsche Boerse acquired A $200 million stake in Kraken to expand institutional cryptocurrency services, even as the exchange revealed limited insider-related security incidents that affected a small number of accounts. Also this week, the Kraken certain A confidential IPO filing saw its valuation fall to $13.3 billion.
