Kraken turning exchange into payments infrastructure
Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, on building the Nasdaq of crypto
The biggest opening for crypto is not retail trading, it is replacing the plumbing for cross border business payments. The workflow is simple and valuable, a business receives dollars as stablecoins, holds them without local currency slippage, then pays suppliers or moves treasury instantly instead of waiting on correspondent banks, wire cutoffs, and manual reconciliation. Kraken’s role in that stack is the exchange layer, on and off ramps, liquidity, compliance, and payout tools that make those transfers usable for merchants and banks.
-
Kraken is describing an exchange that behaves like payments infrastructure. In the interview, the next step after proving trading liquidity is serving merchants, enterprise customers, and banks. That is the same logic behind Krak, which turned Kraken’s rails into a send, receive, and spend app across more than 160 countries.
-
The key product is not just a stablecoin wallet. Businesses need both sides of the bridge. They need to convert between fiat and stablecoins, move large amounts without wide spreads, and settle into local workflows like payroll, payables, and treasury. Layer2 and Rain describe the same pattern, stablecoins win when paired with fiat interoperability and modular payout options.
-
The competitive pattern is becoming clear. Circle is building a network for financial institutions to settle cross border payments in regulated stablecoins, while Kraken is building the liquidity and user layer that can feed those flows. One side coordinates issuers and institutions, the other turns exchange infrastructure into an operating product for global money movement.
This heads toward a market where exchanges, stablecoin issuers, and fintech apps increasingly look like pieces of one global payments stack. The winners will be the firms that can hide crypto complexity, keep spreads tight at high volume, and plug stablecoin balances into everyday business actions like invoicing, supplier payouts, cards, and treasury management.