Kraken's Parent Takes 24/7 Dollar Settlement Into Asia and the Gulf

Payward, the company that operates Kraken, has wired its institutional desk into a Bahrain-licensed bank so that dollars can move at any hour. The arrangement runs over SGB Net, Singapore Gulf Bank's real-time clearing network, and opens to select institutional clients in Asia and Gulf-region jurisdictions. US dollars are the only currency at the start. The joint release is dated 4 October and went out from Sydney; CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, crypto.news and The Crypto Times all carried accounts on Monday. None says how many clients are on it.

Where the business day used to stop

A clearing network is the plumbing a bank uses to move money between accounts and make the transfer final. SGB Net has been running since 2025, and the four accounts read here agree it handles more than $20 billion in fiat transactions a month. crypto.news dates the launch to May; no other account read here gives a month. What the integration changes is the clock. Deposited funds become usable straight away, so an institution trading through the weekend no longer waits for a Monday cutoff or a multi-day settlement leg.

"Settlement stops when the business day does, while their markets do not," Mark Greenberg, Payward's chief commercial officer, said in the release.

CoinDesk carries the same line truncated on the path read here, and The Crypto Times renders the point as a paraphrase instead of a quotation. The release wording is the one above.

A Bahrain bank with a Singapore shareholder

Singapore Gulf Bank holds a full licence from the Central Bank of Bahrain and is backed by Mumtalakat, the Bahraini sovereign wealth fund, and by Whampoa Group of Singapore. crypto.news describes the licence as a conventional wholesale banking one, a detail no other account read here carries. The bank is getting something back. Over coming months it will onboard Kraken Prime, Payward's institutional brokerage arm, as a liquidity source for pricing digital-asset trades to its own customers. That makes this a two-way deal and not a vendor contract.

The second of these in a month

Payward ran the same playbook in the United States in September, when it announced round-the-clock settlement with SoFi for institutional customers there. The company has had a busy quarter on the corporate side, having pushed the Kraken listing back to the second quarter of 2027. CoinDesk also reports that BNY Mellon is in talks with Payward over infrastructure work spanning custody, trading and payments. That account stands alone and is worth treating as unconfirmed.

Everyone is building the same clock

Banks have spent the year trying to make settlement continuous, and the lists of who is doing it do not match. Cointelegraph's account names JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Barclays as the group preparing a shared tokenized-deposit network through The Clearing House in early 2027. This desk reported that project in June with Citi in the third slot. The two lists do not reconcile, and neither is corroborated by a second account read here. Cointelegraph also places a Bank of Korea pilot for out-of-hours won settlement in September, and a reported Circle and Nomura tie-up on instant foreign exchange in Japan next year; both rest on single accounts.

What Monday's announcement leaves open is the size of it. No client count, no expected volumes, no date for the second currency. SGB Net's monthly figure predates the integration, so it says nothing about how much Payward flow will land on the rail. The test is whether an institution in Manama or Singapore can move dollars at three in the morning and have them settled before the desk in New York opens.