Payward Swaps Its Lead Metric and Reports $487 Million for Q3
Payward has reported its third quarter under a measure it had not led with before. The company behind the Kraken exchange put total platform margin at $487 million, up 12% from the second quarter and down 12% from the same three months of 2025. Customer trading volume was $353 billion, about 22% above the second quarter and 30% below a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA came to $60 million. CoinDesk, The Crypto Times and Unchained all carried the $487 million figure between Friday morning and Saturday, and all three put the same two percentages on it.
What the new figure takes out
The old headline line was Adjusted Revenue, which stripped out trading costs and any gains or losses on trading. Total platform margin strips out one thing more, the staking rewards Payward pays to clients. Unchained, which read the release in the early hours of Saturday, quotes the company's reason as wanting everything it passes on to clients treated the same way. The second quarter's figure under the new measure was $436 million, which is where the 12% rise comes from. Adjusted Revenue has not been dropped. It now appears only for comparison. CoinDesk makes the same point about the mechanics, noting that staking rewards paid to clients are deducted from platform margin. CoinDesk calls the measure newly introduced and does not name what it replaced, so the detail of the swap rests on Unchained's account alone.
The same quarter at two rates of decline
The lead figure fell 12% against last year. Adjusted EBITDA fell much further, and here the accounts come apart. Unchained puts the year-earlier figure at $181 million and The Crypto Times puts it at $178.6 million. Both describe the third quarter of 2025, and they do not reconcile. We could not establish which of the two came straight off the release. On either number the fall is close to two thirds, against a 12% decline in the measure Payward now leads with. Against the second quarter the direction reverses: adjusted EBITDA was $23 million three months earlier, so $60 million is close to triple that. The Crypto Times also reports an EBITDA margin of 12% for the quarter, up from 5%, which no other account of the results carried.
Where the income comes from now
Income tied to client assets and to access to Payward's products, data and services made up 52% of total platform margin, against 46% a year before. CoinDesk reads that shift as the reason the revenue decline is cushioned at all, pointing to traditional futures, equities, payments, custody and lending alongside the xStocks tokenized equities platform. Funded accounts reached 7.1 million, 7% more than three months earlier and 37% more than a year ago. Accounts grew while volume shrank.
"the right way to read Payward in 2026 and beyond is not, hey, you're just a bigger crypto exchange," co-CEO Arjun Sethi said, in remarks carried by Unchained.
The filing clock is still running
Payward submitted draft listing paperwork to the SEC confidentially in November 2025, by Unchained's account, and this desk has already covered the offering slipping to the second quarter of 2027. None of the three reports gives a net income or loss figure for the quarter, and none gives a market share number. CoinDesk sets the three months beside two listed peers, with Coinbase Global's revenue down 35% year over year and Gemini Space Station reporting revenue down 19% on a 73% slump in volumes. A prospectus has to carry a full income statement. Nothing published about this quarter so far contains one.
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