We're back at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium 2026 conference, presented to you by SALT, and I'm joined by Dave Ripley, co-CEO at Kraken/Payward. And I was just talking with Mark about this, how Kraken is such an iconic brand, but it's part of a much larger picture that Payward is kind of just illustrating to the world. So, could you explain those two brands and what you guys are working on?
Yeah, sure. So, first of all, Payward has actually always existed as a Kraken. But we didn't really talk about Payward much at all up until recently, the past year or so. So, the company was founded — Payward is the top co, the hold co. And Kraken for a long time was the brand, the flagship brand, the biggest brand. And then after about four or five years, we added a few other brands, CF Benchmarks and so forth. But we still didn't really talk about the fact that there's Payward kind of sitting over all these brands up until the past couple of years where we've really proliferated our number of brands and products underneath the Payward umbrella. So, Payward again is the top co. A lot of our infrastructure sits actually at the Payward level. And Kraken and these other products and brands and so forth leverage that same infrastructure. And so, that's kind of the TLDR on how the setup works.
And what drove that change in marketing to say, 'Okay, we're no longer just going to push Kraken as the main brand. We want to really make sure people know about Payward and what we do.'
Right. Yeah, so that's a good point because we could just still have this collection of brands — Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, CF Benchmarks — and just lead with those and not talk about the parent for what it's worth. So, there's a few tactical reasons to do it, such as, 'Okay, Payward is the top co when we talk to investors and so forth, we need to actually describe what we're talking about and how these pieces fit together.' But the more important and meaningful reason is, as I mentioned, the infrastructure sits at the Payward level. It's shared across all these products and brands, and that's actually really meaningful. It's really meaningful because it allows us to bring products to market that much quicker because we have this shared set of infrastructure. A lot of those things that are shared are really difficult to build — the licensure, the rails, all these various different pieces. Again, reinforces that all these things are shared across the board. And then you probably hit on this with Mark, but the most interesting piece is actually now we're taking that infrastructure, we're packaging it up in a set of services in a very much a B2B way, B2B2C way, where other financial services companies, banks, brokers, fintechs, other tech companies even can use that infrastructure. So, we have a set of APIs and SDKs and developer tools that they go out and build Payward services. All that product stack that they build is their own applications.
And really curious, when folks come to you — I just assume like a more traditional player — when they want to integrate with all the different services that Payward provides, what's the most common reason they're coming to you?
That's a good question. So, it varies. It varies based upon the company and where they're coming from. For what it's worth, we launched Payward Services as a codified brand fairly recently, and we see depending on the type of business, a different set of interest. So, if it's a very TradFi company, a big bank or whatever, there's a good chance they're going to be interested more so in the crypto-specific stuff because that's what they don't have, right? Whereas on the flip side, a company that might be crypto-native, they could be interested in some of our fiat rails. Using our fiat rails is expanding into more geographies. And right now everyone's interested in kind of our tokenized offerings like X-Stocks, for example. And so that cuts across both TradFi and the crypto-native company. So it really depends on the type of business that we're talking to. And so we kind of have pipelines and a number of different businesses that are going to be in implementation mode now and launching this quarter, next quarter.
And this wasn't something that happened overnight. You guys made a series of very strategic acquisitions to be able to offer a multitude of services to just a multitude of clients. What was the reasoning behind some of the decisions you guys made, for example, like with NinjaTrader?
Well, a few different things. I mean, there's a diversification play. Okay, there's that, where we want to diversify our business across all these asset classes. But really it comes down to the customer is the biggest piece. And so, when we talk to our customers, whether they're individual traders, sometimes individual investors, and certainly institutions, a lot of them are interested in multi-asset. Right? And so, we were natively a crypto exchange, but many of our customers, of course, invest in other asset classes and they like their Kraken product, the experience, the service, all these different pieces. They're interested in trading equities with us. They're interested in trading derivatives with us. And so, that's a big piece of it as well. All these things kind of start with the customer — what do they want? And that's who we're solving for.
I think Kraken has a very, very great pulse on the market and has had for a very, very long time. And I assume that's something that starts — it's very ingrained in the culture, but starts from the top down. How are you able to keep such a good pulse on the market while also keeping users safe and not moving too quickly?
Well, there's a bunch of different things. The first thing I'm going to react to is something that's going on right now as we're starting to see TradFi companies add crypto to their offerings, crypto-native companies add TradFi products to their offerings, of which Payward happens to be the market leader. Most of the crypto-native companies — the company that has moved most into traditional, has the biggest share of our revenue all in down the line, most wide offering of products and so forth. Then the third thing that's going to happen — or that is happening — is TradFi products will run on crypto tech. Right? Stablecoins may be the first example of this. Tokenized equities, X-Stocks is another example, tokenized everything — all these different pieces are kind of coming together there. Right? So, I think that's a real meaningful piece that kind of drives all of this.
