Kraken co-CEO lays out one-ledger plan: trading, banking and brokerage together

Kraken wants to do more than buy a bank — it wants to collapse trading, banking and brokerage into a single account. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi used an Oct. 18 appearance on The Wolf of All Streets to sketch where the company is heading: one account that behaves like a trading venue, a brokerage and a bank at the same time. Under his description, dollars, digital coins, tokenized equities and futures margin would all count toward one balance, and users could borrow or trade against it around the clock instead of liquidating positions to raise cash. Sethi credited the roadmap to what he called a decade and a half of internal engineering — safekeeping, key controls, signing rules, offline vaults, margin-liquidation tooling, fiat rails, client onboarding and regulatory licensing.

The bank at the center of the plan is Saldo, the Lithuanian lender Payward agreed to acquire on Oct. 14, with the deal expected to close in 2027 after regulatory review. The reason Kraken bought a bank rather than renting banking partners came down to what Sethi described as a regulatory dividing line: electronic-money outfits must keep client funds matched euro-for-euro, he said, but they usually cannot pay yield on balances or extend credit against them. Licensed banks can. Interest-bearing accounts and credit lines collateralized by customer holdings are therefore first on the European launch list.

No borders, no business hours. That's the shape of it.

A license is not a launch. Until regulators sign off, this remains a plan with a price tag still undisclosed.

Why it matters

This is one of the clearest pictures yet of where the biggest crypto exchanges think the business is going. What Sethi described is a fusion of three businesses that have historically lived in separate apps: an exchange, a global brokerage and a licensed bank. His examples sketched the experience in practice — tokenized equities serving as futures collateral over the weekend, stablecoin-backed payments at any hour, software agents rebalancing funds or finding liquidity overnight. Sethi said the single loudest request from customers was exactly that: a 24/7 system that moves and deploys collateral no matter what form it takes. He also credited Kraken's product pace to building everything in-house, on the theory that internal engineering buys speed — and that the company has now entered a second phase of extending and refining that stack. Some of this is already live: Kraken takes tokenized shares as margin collateral today, and the Payward Banking unit has funded upwards of two billion dollars in loans, holding a limited-purpose Fed master account plus Irish electronic-money authorization.

Europe is the launch pad because that is where the banking charter lives. Saldo answers to the European Central Bank with day-to-day oversight from Lithuania's central bank, runs its retail and SME business across Germany, Sweden, Finland and Lithuania, and can passport into the Netherlands. Payward's stated plans for it include deposit yield, a bigger credit book, card programs and packaging its regulated rails — issuance, SEPA connectivity — for outside fintechs. Saldo's president Jarkko Maensivu said a banking charter only matters for what the company builds on it.

The strategy also answers a business question that has haunted every exchange. Joel Hugentobler, who covers crypto for Javelin Strategy & Research, argued the move deepens customer stickiness, spreads revenue past trading commissions and loosens reliance on outside banking partners — with a single EU license opening member states through passporting. That matters because exchange revenue is famously cyclical, rising and falling with trading volumes. Sethi's take was blunter: the firm that controls the primary relationship gets to supply everything attached to it.