Payward has been sitting on a confidential filing since November 2025. What changed is not the business but the price: Deutsche Borse's April investment valued the exchange a third below its 2025 peak.
Payward, the company behind the Kraken exchange, will not attempt a US listing before the second quarter of 2027, according to a person familiar with the plans cited by Bloomberg. That is roughly eighteen months after it filed for one.
The confidential draft registration statement went to the Securities and Exchange Commission on 19 November 2025, days after Payward closed an $800 million private round that valued it at $20 billion. Jane Street and Citadel Securities were among the investors. Four months later the company put the listing on hold, citing the market conditions that were then dragging on crypto prices, trading volumes and the valuations of every firm exposed to them.
Co-chief executive Arjun Sethi told a Semafor panel in Washington in mid-April that the plan was intact. In the same month, Deutsche Borse Group put $200 million into the company at a $13.3 billion valuation. Those two facts sit awkwardly together. A third of the company's paper value had evaporated in under six months, and no amount of executive reassurance changes what a fresh cheque says about the price a sophisticated buyer will pay.
That, rather than any operational problem, is what has moved the date. Payward's second quarter was a good one: adjusted revenue of $508 million, up 17% on a year earlier, funded accounts up 42% to 6.6 million, and $40 billion of client assets on the platform. The site covered those numbers when they landed, alongside the less flattering half of the release, in which adjusted earnings fell 71%.
The earnings gap is largely deliberate. Payward has spent the past two years buying its way out of being an exchange. It completed its acquisition of the derivatives venue Bitnomial in May, a deal worth up to $550 million that handed Kraken full CFTC licensing for US derivatives. It closed the purchase of the stablecoin payments platform Reap in July, and has agreed to take on Magic Labs' wallet infrastructure business. Before those came NinjaTrader, the tokenisation platform Backed Finance and the token management firm Magna. Its Cyprus arm holds a MiFID II licence; tokenised equities on the platform have passed $5 billion in volume.
None of that is cheap, and none of it flatters a quarterly margin. A private company can absorb that. A newly listed one gets asked why EBITDA collapsed while headcount and acquisition spend did not, and the answer, however sound, is harder to deliver in a quarterly call than in a funding round.
Costs have been coming out elsewhere. Payward cut around 150 staff as it rolled out artificial intelligence tools across the business, a small number against a company that has raised more than $1 billion in the past year but a familiar one across the sector. Coinbase reduced its workforce by 14%, about 700 people, on 5 May. Block cut roughly 4,000 in February. Bitwise shed 14% of its own staff in August as assets under management slid. Crypto job cuts have passed 5,000 for the year, and AI has become the standard explanation attached to all of them.
The listing window is the harder problem. BitGo's 2026 debut has traded unevenly. Revolut pushed its own long-discussed IPO into 2028 last month. Several listed crypto exchanges reported first-quarter losses. Bitcoin was changing hands around $77,500 on Thursday, well below the levels that made a $20 billion valuation defensible in late 2025, and the Federal Reserve's next policy decision is a live risk rather than a formality. An exchange listing into that is an exercise in accepting whatever number the market offers on the day.
Kraken has been here before in a different guise. It settled with the SEC for $30 million in 2023 and shut its US staking programme, and it spent much of this year pruning its own listings, with 56 tokens marked for delisting in August. The company that would go public in 2027 is a substantially different, more heavily regulated business than the one that filed in 2025, which is an argument for waiting and also an argument that the wait is doing something.
What it is not is a matter of readiness. Sethi has said the company is around 80% ready to go public. Payward's 2025 revenue rose 33% to $2.2 billion on $2 trillion of transaction volume, with adjusted EBITDA of $530.6 million. Circle managed a New York listing off a narrower business. The difference is that Circle went when the window was open.
Payward has not commented on the record about the new timetable. If the second quarter of 2027 holds, the confidential filing submitted on 19 November 2025 will have sat with the SEC for about eighteen months before a single share trades.
