Payward Delays the Kraken IPO to Q2 2027 as Volumes Fall 13%

Payward is not planning to take Kraken public until the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest. CoinDesk reported it on Wednesday, sourcing a person it did not name. The company has said nothing publicly. Its own second-quarter numbers explain the shape of the decision well enough: revenue up, volume down, earnings thin. Platform transaction volume fell 13% to $310 billion.

A filing that has been sitting since November

The confidential S-1 went to the SEC in November 2025. Plans were frozen in March, with difficult market conditions given as the reason. In May, co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the exchange was about "80% ready to go public", a line CCN, Yahoo Finance and BitcoinKE all carried that month. Wednesday's report pushes the target roughly a year past where the March freeze left it. Nobody at Payward has confirmed the date. Both crypto.news and COINOTAG present it as CoinDesk's reporting and not as an announcement, which is the correct reading of what is on the record.

Revenue up, earnings down

Adjusted revenue for the second quarter was $508 million, up 17% year on year. Funded accounts reached 6.6 million, up 42%, and platform assets stood at $40 billion. The strain sits below the top line. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $23 million, and Crypto Briefing alone adds that the figure was down 71% from a year earlier; the other three accounts print it with no comparison. Volume is the line an exchange listing rests on, and it moved the wrong way. Coinbase's own second quarter missed on revenue while its market share hit a record, so the pattern is not Kraken's alone.

Two valuations, both in print

Payward raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation, with $200 million of that from Citadel Securities. CoinDesk, crypto.news and COINOTAG all use the $20 billion. Crypto Briefing puts the current estimate near $13.3 billion. The two do not reconcile and neither outlet addresses the other. One is a primary round and the other a secondary estimate, and no account says which supersedes which. On the arithmetic, the spread is about a third of the company.

The buying has not stopped in the meantime. COINOTAG prices NinjaTrader at $1.5 billion in 2025, Bitnomial at $550 million and Reap Technologies at $600 million in cash and stock, with Backed Finance unpriced; those prices appear in that account alone. The dates wobble too. CoinDesk puts the Reap close in July and COINOTAG puts it in May. Kraken has been moving into products that sit beside equities, and this week it turned up alongside the London Stock Exchange in a plan to tokenize 100 UK blue chips.

Kraken is not the only one waiting

Grayscale delayed its own listing on 28 May and put the earliest restart in the fourth quarter of 2026. Its spokesperson would not go further.

"Due to the SEC-mandated quiet period, we are unable to comment at this time," the spokesperson said.

Consensys and Ledger have postponed as well. Blockchain.com filed confidentially the week before Grayscale pulled back, so the queue has not emptied. BitGo listed in January and trades about 36% below its offer price on COINOTAG's count, a figure no other account reviewed repeats; CoinDesk in May called the post-listing performance underwhelming and gave no number.

What a year of waiting costs

The second quarter of 2027 is far enough out that none of Wednesday's figures will still be current when it arrives. Bitcoin sat around $77,000 in COINOTAG's account and below $76,500 in CoinDesk's session copy the same day, which is the sort of spread that decides whether an exchange's volume line turns. Crypto Briefing alone reports Payward as the first crypto firm to hold a Federal Reserve master account, and that claim stands single-sourced. The S-1 stays confidential until the company chooses otherwise, so the numbers a public market would price are still Payward's to release, and the next quarterly set lands long before any listing window opens.