Payward, Kraken’s parent, closed its purchase of Reap Technologies for up to $600 million on July 1, structured as cash and stock. No per-share price here, Reap was privately held, but the deal moved fast: signed in May, closed within eight weeks, according to Reap’s newsroom post.
What does the buyer actually get? Reap brings stablecoin-native card issuing, cross-border payment rails, and treasury-management workflows, along with the regulatory licenses to run them across Hong Kong and the wider APAC market. Payward supplies the liquidity, custody, and settlement layer Reap couldn’t build alone. Reap keeps its brand and its leadership team, led by Daren Guo, operating as a standalone unit inside Payward Services, per Reap’s own newsroom post.
The comparable transaction here isn’t a crypto exchange deal, it’s payments plumbing. Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge in 2024 to buy the same kind of stablecoin settlement infrastructure. Payward got Reap for roughly half that, a discount that likely reflects Reap’s narrower footprint next to Bridge’s US-heavy book.
Adoption still doesn’t justify urgency on its own. Only 13% of middle-market firms use stablecoins today, per PYMNTS Intelligence’s Certainty Project, with regulatory uncertainty cited as the top holdout reason. Payward isn’t buying a customer base. It’s buying the rails before the customers show up.
The timing lines up with Payward’s own reported push toward a $20 billion IPO valuation. A regulated B2B payments unit spanning three regions reads a lot better in a prospectus than a spot exchange alone.
Diana Kowalski