BNY And Kraken Parent Weigh Market Infrastructure Partnership

BNY and Payward, the parent company of Kraken, are discussing a potential partnership across digital assets and financial market infrastructure, PYMNTS reported, citing a CoinDesk account based on unnamed sources.

The report describes a possible arrangement involving custody, payments and other infrastructure services.

A possible agreement could use Payward Services, the group’s business platform for banks, exchanges and asset managers, to connect areas such as token services, safekeeping, investment-client tools, trading rails, payments and related institutional systems.

The negotiations remain unfinished, and the report did not describe a signed term sheet or binding deal.

BNY and Payward both chose not to comment to CoinDesk, leaving the scope and timing of any partnership unresolved.

The market structure context is important because Payward has already been widening its institutional relationships beyond consumer crypto trading.

PYMNTS compared the possible BNY tie-up with the infrastructure portion of Payward’s recent agreement with Nasdaq, which combined investment, tokenization work and surveillance cooperation.

Nasdaq said on Sept. 10 that Nasdaq Ventures agreed to invest $100 million in Payward as part of a broader expansion of the companies’ partnership.

That arrangement also keeps the companies working on the Nasdaq Equity Token framework and adds a new market surveillance agreement.

The tokenized-equity project is scheduled for the second quarter of 2027 under the NET framework.

Nasdaq described the work as part of building a foundation for tokenized equities to move across different market environments, a goal that places exchange operations, compliance and settlement questions near the center of Payward’s institutional strategy.

A BNY arrangement would point at a different part of the same infrastructure problem.

Instead of only listing or surveillance mechanics, the potential partnership would bring in bank-linked functions such as custody, wealth management and payments, areas where large financial institutions already manage client, regulatory and operational obligations.

Whether the current talks become a signed agreement remains unresolved.

Until that changes, the discussions show how digital-asset firms and traditional financial infrastructure providers are testing where custody, trading, payments and tokenized-market systems can fit together without a confirmed commercial outcome.