Kraken Parent Payward’s Q2 Revenue Rises 17% as Trading Volume Falls 13%
Payward, the parent company of Kraken, reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter, up 17% year over year, even as total platform transaction volume fell 13% to $310 billion, according to Cointelegraph and Finance Magnates. Both outlets, reporting Friday, described the same underlying pattern: a crypto exchange group generating more money while trading less of it.
What both outlets confirm
Cointelegraph and Finance Magnates agree on the core numbers. Funded accounts rose 42% year over year to 6.6 million, both reported. The revenue Payward earns from client balances rather than individual trades — asset-based and other revenue, in the outlets’ terms — climbed to 60% of the total last quarter, up from 55% a year earlier, both outlets reported. Both also reported that Payward gained spot market share for a third consecutive quarter, with growth in futures, equities and tokenized equities offsetting weaker crypto spot activity.
Both outlets also confirm Payward’s acquisition trail: NinjaTrader, a futures trading platform, and Bitnomial, a regulated derivatives exchange, plus a pending deal to acquire the wallet infrastructure business of Magic Labs. Cointelegraph dates the NinjaTrader deal to May 2025 and describes Bitnomial as closing the following year; Finance Magnates specifies the Bitnomial deal closed May 1.
Where the reporting diverges
Beyond the shared headline figures, the two outlets’ reporting depth diverges sharply. Cointelegraph alone reports that Payward remained adjusted EBITDA positive at $23 million — a figure Finance Magnates does not mention.
Finance Magnates alone supplies the industry backdrop: crypto spot trading volume fell 27.9% industry-wide in the second quarter, with eToro, Robinhood and Coinbase all posting declining crypto revenue, according to Finance Magnates’ own reporting. Finance Magnates also reports that client balances, measured at constant asset prices, grew 48% year over year to $65 billion, and that futures daily average revenue trades rose 8% year over year — neither figure appears in Cointelegraph’s account.
Finance Magnates additionally details product and regulatory moves absent from Cointelegraph’s report: a Flexline crypto-backed credit line launched for US clients in June, a virtual IBAN product expanded to 11 additional European markets, a stablecoin-payments platform called Reap that closed July 1, and an OCC national trust company charter application filed in May that remains pending. Finance Magnates describes Payward’s internal architecture in the company’s own words as
“one matching engine, one risk engine, one settlement core”
— a description Cointelegraph does not include.
Why it matters
The results land as Payward’s peers wrestle with the same slowdown in spot trading. Finance Magnates’ reporting that eToro, Robinhood and Coinbase all posted declining crypto revenue frames Payward’s 17% revenue growth as an outlier built on diversification — futures, tokenized equities, banking-style products and asset-based fees — rather than a rebound in trading itself.
What remains unresolved
Neither Cointelegraph nor Finance Magnates cites a directly quoted primary filing or transcript in describing what both call Friday’s earnings report; readers cannot yet verify the EBITDA figure, the client-balance figure, or the DARTs figure against a primary document independently. It is also not stated by either outlet when a decision on Payward’s pending OCC trust charter application might arrive, nor whether the Magic Labs acquisition has closed.
What to watch
Future quarters will show whether the 60% asset-based revenue share continues climbing, per the trend both outlets describe, and whether the OCC charter decision or the Magic Labs deal closing brings additional primary-source confirmation of the figures reported so far by only one outlet each.
Sources
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
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