BNY talks to Kraken parent Payward about an infrastructure deal on the Nasdaq model

The two people who described the talks to CoinDesk ^[1] offered one comparison, and it covers only half of the Nasdaq deal. Payward's Nasdaq agreement had an equity part, a $100 million investment by Nasdaq Ventures at a $21 billion valuation ^[7], and an operating part built around equity tokens and surveillance technology ^[8]. One of the people compared the BNY talks to the infrastructure component ^[3]. The equity part bought Nasdaq about 0.48% of Payward ^[1].

The reporting fits more than one kind of deal. In one, BNY licenses the tools Payward sells through Payward Services, its business-to-business unit for banks, exchanges and asset managers ^[2], and offers them to the institutions it already serves in custody, clearing and wealth management ^[5]. In another, the deal runs both ways, as Payward's other recent agreements did. Payward took on Nasdaq's surveillance systems ^[8], and its SoFi agreement included access to SoFi's real-time settlement network, according to Crypto Briefing ^[13]. BNY has a settlement product of its own in tokenized deposits ^[6]. The third outcome is no deal: the people said there is no guarantee of one, and both companies declined to comment ^[4].

I think the evidence supports a smaller claim than a general custody-bank preference for licensing exchange infrastructure. BNY appears to be making the choice one layer at a time. It is building the cash leg itself and discussing buying in the trading and custody leg ^[6][2]. On the reported record, BNY is neither building an exchange nor buying one. It is one bank, and the talks are unsigned. Two things would prove the licensing reading wrong: signed terms that make BNY's tokenized deposits the settlement cash on Payward's venues, which would put BNY on the supplier side, or a BNY trading venue of its own ^[6].

Every acquisition in this story is Payward's. It agreed in April to pay as much as $550 million for Bitnomial, followed that with a $600 million deal for Reap ^[10], and paid about $1.5 billion for NinjaTrader in 2025 ^[11]. The three deals add up to as much as $2.65 billion ^[2], about 12.6% of the valuation at which Nasdaq invested ^[3].

Payward's IPO is now due no earlier than the second quarter of 2027 ^[12], the same quarter Nasdaq Equity Tokens are scheduled to launch ^[9]. I'd expect a signed BNY agreement to sit next to Nasdaq and SoFi in any offering document as proof that banks buy from Payward Services. The onchain volumes behind the tokenized-equity pitch are still small. Payward said in March that xStocks had passed $25 billion in transaction volume, with more than $4 billion of it settled onchain ^[14], a share of at least 16% ^[4].