Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi joined CNBC in August at the 2026 Wyoming Blockchain Symposium to discuss the U.S. launch of the Krak Card, where crypto regulation is heading, and how digital assets are becoming part of everyday finance.
What Arjun Sethi said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward (Kraken), discussed the Clarity Act, the new Kraken cashback debit card, and the company's broader strategy. He expressed optimism about the Clarity Act, noting the US is last in crypto regulation but conversations have shifted toward innovation. Sethi detailed the Payward stack, which includes Kraken Pro, the consumer app, and banking services, and highlighted the Kraken card as a way to earn rewards without going into debt. He emphasized the mission to remove intermediaries and provide financial access, and predicted that as traditional assets move on-chain, crypto's cyclicality will decrease. He also mentioned agentic finance as a key innovation and criticized large banks for not passing on Fed interest rates to average individuals.
Key takeaways
Sethi is optimistic about the Clarity Act, saying it's a matter of 'when' not 'if' it becomes law.
The Kraken card offers cashback rewards without requiring users to go into debt, unlike traditional credit cards.
Kraken's consumer app launched about a year ago in roughly 180 markets worldwide.
Sethi predicts that as more traditional assets move on-chain, crypto will see less cyclicality and may not be a distinct topic in 10 years.
Sethi criticized large banks for not passing on Fed interest rates to average individuals, a trust issue Kraken aims to address.
I want to start with the Clarity Act. That is kind of the thing on everyone's mind and let's just get this part of the interview out of the way. What are your thoughts? Do you have confidence that Congress will, you know, make progress on it in September and it'll become law this year? And if not, what does that mean for Kraken and for the crypto industry broadly?
Yeah. So a year ago we were sitting here and we were just talking about Genius Act passing and we started talking about the Clarity Act. So it's been a year. So it's been a while and I think what's more important is the United States is last in these frameworks around what it means to regulate crypto market structure bill etc. And I think what's more important is that at least in the last year, the discussions have been a little bit more about we had Dodd-Frank in 2008 and all the ramifications of what worked and what didn't. And with crypto and the market structure real moving forward, a lot of the conversations are about, okay, well, how do we actually innovate rather than regulate? And so I'm generally pretty optimistic about what it will look like. And it's not about an if, it's more about when.
Speaking of innovation, you have some news this morning. It is out of the Kraken app versus the Kraken exchange and it is this cashback debit card. So I want you to tell me a little bit about the news itself, the Kraken card, the Kraken app, which is going to be I think new to a lot of our audience and just why you're launching this right now and how exactly it fits in the broader Kraken ecosystem because again a lot of our audience is just so much more familiar with the crypto exchange of it all versus the rest of this financial stack that you guys have clearly built.
Yeah. So actually what's really interesting is that the majority of our customers are outside the United States and so a lot of the innovation that we've built for the company has been under what we call our Payward stack. So Payward infrastructure and then Kraken and the exchange infrastructure sits underneath that. So Kraken Pro for professional traders very similar to Interactive Brokers. Then we have our Kraken consumer app which is very akin to a Robinhood. And then Kraken for us was more around banking and financial services. So Payward trading, Payward asset management, Payward banking is a lot of the products that we build. The Kraken card is a part of our Kraken app.
It was roughly about a year ago when we launched it actually worldwide in about 180 markets. What's the way to sort of think about the Kraken app itself is that you're able to send, receive, store your money just like a bank and have banking and financial services all over the world, but you're able to get yield not just in crypto but in tokenized assets, in USD type rewards and yields. Whereas a traditional bank will get you, you know, 2 to 3%. If you have a lot of money, they might give you 5 to 6% like if you're really pushing it. But we have like different strategies on behalf of the customers that give you two, three, five, even percent depending on your strategy and regardless of your account size and then the Kraken card is essentially we want to be able to give you the same types of rewards that you're used to on the credit card but the problem with credit card is that you're going into debt to get the rewards. We want to be able to give you those rewards with your own capital.
Talk a little bit more about this expansion because as I've just said, you know, it's not just the audience being most familiar with Kraken the crypto exchange. I've covered crypto for a long time. I very much think of Kraken as one of the OG exchanges and even to this day one that's a little bit closer to crypto natives in brand and identity I guess. And so talk to me about the broader expansion which is happening at a time when we're seeing competitors of yours in the space trying to get away from the volatility and the crypto-ness of crypto and just kind of expanding a little bit more to either financial infrastructure and or sort of this financial super app type thing.
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Sethi, A. (2026, September 29). Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi on U.S. Krak Card, Regulation and Crypto [Interview transcript]. Kraken Crypto Exchange. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2948837/
MLA
Arjun Sethi. "Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi on U.S. Krak Card, Regulation and Crypto." Kraken Crypto Exchange, 29 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2948837/.
BibTeX
@misc{sethi2026_2948837,
author = {Arjun Sethi},
title = {Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi on U.S. Krak Card, Regulation and Crypto},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Kraken Crypto Exchange. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2948837/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
