BNY is in talks with Payward, the Wyoming-based parent of crypto exchange Kraken, over a broad partnership spanning digital assets and financial-market infrastructure, CoinDesk reports, citing two people familiar with the matter.
The potential agreement could cover crypto products and custody, wealth management and trading, plus payments and infrastructure. Those offerings run through Payward Services, the company's business-to-business platform that serves banks and exchanges alongside asset managers. Discussions are ongoing and there is no guarantee a deal gets done. Both companies declined to comment.
The Nasdaq template
Elements of the proposed partnership could resemble the infrastructure component of Payward's recent commercial agreement with Nasdaq, one of the sources said. That relationship already has money behind it. Last month, Nasdaq Ventures agreed to invest $100 million in Payward at a $21 billion valuation.
What BNY brings
BNY, formerly Bank of New York Mellon, is a custody banking giant. It provides custody and asset servicing, clearing and wealth management to institutional clients, and it has been developing tokenized deposits designed to support near-real-time onchain settlement between institutional market participants.
In other words, BNY is already building the onchain plumbing. A partnership with Payward would give it crypto-native products and infrastructure it would otherwise have to build alone.
My take
I keep coming back to what Payward is becoming. Kraken is the brand everyone knows, but the B2B platform is where the action is. Selling custody and trading, plus payments and other infrastructure, to banks and asset managers is a very different business from running an exchange, and it is clearly the business Payward wants. CoinDesk notes a BNY deal would extend its push to connect its digital-asset operations with established financial institutions. That push is the story.
For everyone outside the deal, this is plumbing news. If it happens, it will not move your bitcoin. It does say something about where the industry is heading. The exchanges that survive are turning into vendors for the institutions they were supposed to route around. I find that a little deflating, honestly, but it is also just what maturation looks like.
The usual caveats apply. Anonymous sources, no comment from either side, talks that could fall apart. Still, a $21 billion valuation with Nasdaq Ventures on the cap table suggests investors are already pricing in the pivot. Whether BNY signs is another matter.