Why Kraken acquired Reap for $600M
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: Stripe acquired Bridge, Ripple acquired Rail, Mastercard acquired BVNK, and last week, Payward (dba Kraken) acquired stablecoin card & orchestration provider Reap in acquisitions totaling nearly $4B. Payward now competes with Stripe on stablecoin rails and Airwallex on global money movement as it builds toward a full-stack B2B crypto offering for the world's fastest-growing fintechs. For more, check out our full report on Kraken (dataset).
We previously covered stablecoin infrastructure company Reap’s cross-border stablecoin business in our interview with Reap co-founder Kevin Kang, and we covered the crypto exchange Kraken’s strategy of fostering apps & services on top of their platform in our interview with co-CEO Arjun Sethi.
Last week, Payward (dba Kraken) announced its acquisition of Reap for $600M, roughly 40% cash and 60% stock in Payward, last valued at $20B.
Key points on the deal via Sacra AI:
- Bridge (acquired by Stripe for $1.1B in February 2025), Rail (previously Layer2 Financial, acquired by Ripple for $200M in August 2025) and BVNK (acquired by Mastercard for $1.8B in March 2026) created developer APIs on top of underlying stablecoin issuers (Circle, Tether), blockchains (Ethereum, Solana, Polygon), banks (Lead Bank, Cross River) and liquidity providers (B2C2, Cumberland) to help fintechs give customers stablecoin accounts, fiat on/off ramps, and 24-7/365 money transfer, monetizing on volume (on top of gas / network fees) at lower rates than SWIFT / PayPal / Wise / FX.
- Stablecoin-backed cards have shown extreme product-market fit in enabling high frequency use of stablecoins in off-ramping to fiat on VISA & Mastercard, monetizing via interchange fees invisible to the end user, with annualized crypto card volumes growing to $18B/year, up 3x YoY, lead by breakout leader Rain at $3B in annualized volume, up 38x YoY, powering tradfi-crypto hybrids like Slash ($255M annualized revenue as of March 2026) that assemble their crypto offering by bringing together Bridge (accounts), Rail (payouts), Alchemy (blockchain API), Turnkey (custody) and Rain (cards) to make the UX alongside traditional banking as seamless as possible.
- By adding stablecoin card & orchestration company Reap to the Payward family of brands, Payward ($2.2B revenue in 2025, up 33% YoY) expands into B2B fintech infrastructure with Reap as an “app” on top of its Kraken exchange as the platform, compounding its liquidity loop—cards & payments create transactions, settlement & on/off ramping demand between fiat (USD, HKD) and stables (USDC, USDT)—and adding to the $2T in platform transaction volume in 2025, up 34% YoY ($357B in transaction volume in Q1 2026) and $2.2B in revenue in 2025, up 33% YoY ($507M in Q1 2026 revenue).
- The acquisition brings the Kraken crypto stack into competition with FX & fiat fintech stack Airwallex ($1.3B annualized revenue as of April 2026, up ~80% YoY, $266B in annualized transaction volume) on global money movement & currency conversion, especially in Asia (Airwallex’s and Reap’s focus geography), and Stripe via Bridge ($6.9B in revenue in 2025, growing 36% YoY), whose payments middleware extends horizontally across fiat and stablecoin rails with $1.9T in total transaction volume in 2025, up 34% YoY.
- With consolidation by tradfi companies of stablecoin players, Kraken positions as a one stop crypto shop to serve the B2B fintech segment that’s laser focused on geographic expansion & serving global business including payroll providers like Deel, corporate cards like Ramp & Brex, neobanks like Revolut (UK & US) & Kapital (Mexico) and payments providers like Cloudwalk (Brazil)—with the upside of building a full stack stablecoin network with a durable take rate on transaction volume that’s indexed on the GDP of the stablecoin economy (currently ~$500B, up 30% YoY).
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Kraken (dataset)
- Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, on building the Nasdaq of crypto
- Kevin Kang, co-founder of Reap, on stablecoin-native business models in fintech
- Farooq Malik and Charles Naut, co-founders of Rain, on stablecoin-backed credit cards
- Bhanu Kohli, CEO of Layer2 Financial, on stablecoin-backed payments for platforms
- Stablecoins and fintech infrastructure
- Stablecoin diplomacy
- Robinhood vs Kraken vs Coinbase
- $2.5B/year Robinhood for professional traders
- eToro vs Robinhood
- Fernando Sandoval, co-founder of Kapital, on stablecoins for cross-border payments
- Stablecoins > Visa
- CloudWalk at $1.3B/year growing 131% YoY
