USDKraken Expands U.S. Derivatives Push With Bitnomial Deal
Exchange operator keeps IPO filing active as Deutsche Borse buys secondary stake
TL;DR
- Payward, the parent company of Kraken, said Friday it agreed to acquire Bitnomial to expand U.S. spot margin trading, perpetual futures and options.
- Arjun Sethi said Kraken’s confidential U.S. IPO filing submitted in November 2025 remains active, while Deutsche Borse agreed to buy $200 million of existing shares.
- Kraken also said an extortion attempt tied to rogue support personnel affected about 2,000 accounts, or roughly 0.02% of users, with no customer funds lost.
We’ve launched the all-new COIN360 Perp DEX, built for traders who move fast!
Trade 130+ assets with up to 100× leverage, enjoy instant order placement and low-slippage swaps, and earn USDC passive yield while climbing the leaderboard. Your trades deserve more than speed — they deserve mastery.
Payward, the parent company of Kraken, said Friday it agreed to acquire Bitnomial, a U.S.-licensed crypto and derivatives exchange, as Kraken pushes deeper into regulated market infrastructure while keeping its confidential U.S. initial public offering filing active and managing a separate extortion case tied to rogue support personnel.
Payward said the Bitnomial acquisition is aimed at expanding spot margin trading, perpetual futures and options for U.S. clients. The company also said the deal would strengthen Payward Services by giving business customers API access to spot trading, tokenized stocks, crypto derivatives and fiat onramps.
Bitnomial’s regulatory position was central to the announcement. Payward said Bitnomial is the first crypto-native U.S. venue to hold all three Commodity Futures Trading Commission licenses for exchange, clearinghouse and brokerage functions.
Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward and Kraken, said the transaction is tied to market structure rather than branding. “Settlement mechanics, margin models, and contract structures define what products can exist and who can access them. The US has had no clearing infrastructure built for digital assets,” Sethi said. He added that Bitnomial “spent a decade building it: crypto settlement, crypto collateral, continuous 24/7 markets.”
IPO filing remains active as Deutsche Borse takes stake
Kraken’s latest confirmed public-markets status is that its confidential U.S. IPO filing remains active. Sethi said on April 14, 2026, that the company had confidentially filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and that the draft S-1 first submitted in November 2025 is still live.
A separate secondary transaction gave Deutsche Borse a path into Kraken’s cap table without putting new operating capital into the company. Deutsche Borse agreed to buy existing Payward shares for $200 million, a transaction expected to give it about a 1.5% fully diluted stake.
The companies expect the Deutsche Borse transaction to close in the second quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary conditions. The deal was described as a secondary purchase, meaning it does not provide fresh capital to Kraken.
The broader commercial agenda tied to Deutsche Borse extends beyond the equity purchase. Plans described around the partnership include integration into 360T’s foreign-exchange trading platform, white-label Kraken Embed products for European and U.S. financial institutions, exploration of exchange-traded crypto futures and options through Eurex pending regulatory approval, and tokenization work connected to Clearstream’s tokenized-securities platform launched in November 2025.
Sethi described Kraken’s product strategy as widening institutional-grade market access. “What they want at the end of the day is what Citadel and Jane Street have, or JPMorgan has, and they want it accessible to them,” Sethi said. “That’s our mission: How do we make all these products open?”
Institutional buildout and security incident
Kraken’s expansion drive has been accompanied by several other milestones. Those include the October 2025 launch of CME futures trading, xStocks tokenized equities surpassing $10 billion in cumulative trading volume in November, Nasdaq selecting Kraken in March for a tokenized-stock settlement initiative, and Kraken’s $1.5 billion acquisition of NinjaTrader.
On the banking side, Kraken in March 2026 became the first crypto company to receive approval for a limited-purpose master account from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The approval gives Kraken direct access to Fedwire for settlement through the Federal Reserve’s central payments system, although the account was described as a one-year arrangement with restrictions and as similar to the “skinny” master-account concept backed by Christopher Waller and promoted by Senator Cynthia Lummis in 2025.
Kraken also said on April 13, 2026, that it was facing an extortion attempt tied to rogue support personnel who misused legitimate access privileges in two isolated incidents. Kraken said the case did not involve a breach of core exchange infrastructure or a compromise of exchange systems.
The company said it first detected the issue in February 2025 after receiving a tip about a criminal-forum video showing internal client-support systems. Kraken later received a second tip tied to a more recent similar video, then identified the employee involved, revoked access and opened a full investigation.
Kraken said all affected users were contacted directly. The company said the criminal group escalated only after the latest unauthorized access had already been stopped, threatening to release videos of internal systems and client data to media outlets and on social media.
Chief Security Officer Nick Percoco said Kraken would not respond by paying the attackers. “We will not pay these criminals,” Percoco said. He added, “We will not ever negotiate with bad actors.”
Percoco also said Kraken is working with federal law enforcement across multiple jurisdictions and believes it has enough evidence to identify and arrest the people behind the extortion scheme.
FAQ
What is Payward acquiring?
Bitnomial, a U.S.-licensed crypto and derivatives exchange.
Is Kraken’s IPO filing still active?
Yes. Arjun Sethi said the confidential filing remains live.
Did Deutsche Borse invest fresh capital in Kraken?
No. The transaction is a secondary purchase of existing shares.
Were customer funds lost in the extortion case?
No. Kraken said no customer funds were lost.
This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.
