BNY’s onchain settlement push explains its talks with Kraken parent Payward

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, people familiar with the matter said on September 30.

The talks, which both companies declined to comment on and which may not end in an agreement, would pair one of the world’s largest custody banks with a crypto exchange group that has spent 2026 signing infrastructure deals with Nasdaq and SoFi. The potential agreement could cover crypto products, custody, wealth management, trading and payments, all delivered through Payward Services, the company’s business-to-business platform for banks, exchanges and asset managers.

Settlement is the prize for the bank

The pull for BNY is the settlement layer. The bank has been developing tokenized deposits designed to support near-real-time onchain settlement between institutional market participants, part of a broader push into digital-asset infrastructure. That technology needs counterparties with venues, custody plumbing and market access on the crypto side, which is what Payward has been assembling.

BNY, formerly Bank of New York Mellon, provides custody, asset servicing, clearing and wealth-management services to institutional clients. Near-real-time settlement onchain would compress the multi-day settlement windows that custody clients work with today, one reason the bank has treated digital-asset infrastructure as a build priority rather than a sideline.

People familiar with the talks say elements of the proposed partnership could resemble the infrastructure component of Payward’s recent Nasdaq agreement.

Payward brings the rails

Payward’s side of the equation is xStocks, its tokenized-equities infrastructure. Under the Nasdaq agreement, Payward will connect Nasdaq’s tokenized equities framework to xStocks and adopt Nasdaq’s market-surveillance technology across its trading venues, with Nasdaq Equity Tokens targeted for the second quarter of 2027. Payward said in March that xStocks had surpassed $25 billion in transaction volume, including more than $4 billion settled onchain.

A BNY deal would extend a run that includes a SoFi agreement in September covering banking, payments, liquidity and digital assets, plus acquisitions of the crypto derivatives firm Bitnomial for as much as $550 million and stablecoin-payments company Reap for $600 million. Payward has also pushed its planned IPO to the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.