TL;DR:
- Deutsche Börse invested $200 million in Payward, Kraken’s parent company, securing a 1.5% stake in the fully diluted share capital.
- The deal values Kraken at approximately $13.3 billion, below the $20 billion estimate from November 2025.
- Kraken confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO in November and could go public this year.
Deutsche Börse announced a strategic investment of $200 million in Payward Inc., the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. The deal grants the German company a 1.5% stake in the fully diluted share capital of the firm. Closing is expected in the second quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
The transaction values Kraken at approximately $13.3 billion, a significant drop from the $20 billion the firm reached in November 2025, when Citadel Securities led an $800 million funding round. At that same time, Payward confidentially filed its IPO application in the United States, a process that could be completed this year.
Integrating Traditional Finance and the Crypto Market
The investment formalizes and deepens a partnership announced in December 2025, under which Kraken would be integrated with 360T, Deutsche Börse’s foreign exchange trading platform. The goal of both companies is to build a unified infrastructure for institutional clients that operates across both traditional and crypto assets, without the need to maintain parallel systems.
Deutsche Börse: Building an Integrated Value Chain
Thomas Book, member of the Deutsche Börse executive board, summed up the alliance’s vision: “We want to create an integrated value chain, regardless of whether the asset is tokenized or fully digital.” Direct institutional participation in the crypto industry continues to deepen. This year also saw the disclosure of an approximately $200 million investment by the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange, in the exchange OKX, valued at the time at $25 billion.
Kraken, one of the world’s oldest crypto exchanges, reported $2.2 billion in adjusted revenue during 2025, growth the company attributed to an expansion beyond spot trading and into a broader range of financial services. In March, Kraken became the first crypto company to gain access to the Federal Reserve’s core payment system, a milestone that underscores the advancing integration between digital finance and the traditional financial system.
