Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, agreed to acquire Saldo Bank, a small Lithuanian lender, in a deal that would make it the first crypto firm to buy a European bank. The price was not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in 2027, according to CoinDesk, citing a Financial Times report.
What Payward is actually buying
Saldo Bank is tiny. It held 163.9 million euros (about $180 million) in total assets at the end of 2025, up 22.7% from a year earlier, according to The Banks. Nobody buys a bank that size for its loan book. They buy the license.
An EU banking license lets Payward offer European customers interest-bearing deposits, loans, card services, and euro payments. That is the full retail banking stack sitting next to a crypto exchange. Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi framed it plainly: "A regulated EU bank is the piece that lets us serve European clients the way a primary financial institution should: one place to hold assets, move them freely, and put them to work."
This was the plan all along
The acquisition did not come out of nowhere. CoinDesk reported in July that Kraken had been seeking a banking license in Lithuania. Buying Saldo looks like the faster route to the same result, skipping the wait for a fresh license application to grind through the process.
The US side tells the same story. Payward has applied for a national trust bank charter, and its banking arm secured limited access to the Federal Reserve's payment system. The company is assembling regulated banking pieces on both sides of the Atlantic at once.
My read
I keep coming back to how small Saldo is. A bank with $180 million in assets is a rounding error next to Kraken's business, and that is the tell. This is a license purchase. I do not mean that as an insult. Crypto firms spent years complaining that banks would not serve them. Now the biggest ones are becoming banks, or buying them outright.
The open question is approval. The deal is not expected to close until 2027, which is a long runway for supervisors to get cold feet about an exchange owning a licensed bank. If it closes, expect other crypto firms to go shopping for small EU lenders. If it stalls, that tells you where the real boundary still sits.
Nobody knows how this plays out. But the direction is clear enough. The wall between crypto and banking is not coming down. It is being bought, one small bank at a time.