Kraken Custody

Company and ownership

Kraken Custody is the qualified custody service of Kraken Institutional, owned by Payward, Inc., which does business as Kraken. Jesse Powell co-founded the company in 2011, and Arjun Sethi is co-CEO. Payward is private. It raised $800 million in late 2025, including $200 million from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation, after raising only $27 million of primary capital before that round, and in November 2025 it confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the SEC. For 2025 it reported $2.2 billion of adjusted revenue.

Custody opened to US clients in March 2024 and expanded to institutions in the UK and Australia in July 2024. In November 2025 Kraken's Irish subsidiary, Payward Europe Solutions, began offering MiCA custody to firms in the European Economic Area.

Custody model and security

Kraken states that custody is provided by Payward Financial, Inc. or Payward Europe Solutions Limited, as applicable. Private keys are generated on specialized hardware, and an MPC layer distributes authority over them to reduce single points of failure; Kraken pairs the MPC setup with FIPS-validated HSMs. Vault-based permissions, role-based approvals and policy controls decide who can move assets. Holdings are legally segregated and bankruptcy-remote, and they can be verified on-chain.

Kraken publishes a quarterly proof of reserves, and in June 2025 it completed a SOC 2 Type 2 examination covering its institutional qualified custody offering. For Ethena's USDe reserves, it describes segregated cold storage vaults secured with HSMs and MPC, with weekly proof of reserves reporting and monthly custodian attestations from January 2026.

Regulation and supervision

Payward Financial, Inc., known as Kraken Financial, received a special purpose depository institution charter from the Wyoming State Banking Board in 2020 and is supervised by the Wyoming Division of Banking. Kraken says the bank meets the qualified custodian definition in the SEC Custody Rule. On March 4, 2026 it received a Federal Reserve master account, which Kraken calls a first for a digital asset bank, giving it direct access to Fedwire. Deposits at Kraken Financial are not FDIC-insured.

In Europe, Payward Europe Solutions Limited holds a MiCA authorization from the Central Bank of Ireland, and the French AMF register lists custody and administration of crypto-assets among its passported services from June 25, 2025. On May 8, 2026 Payward applied to the OCC for a national trust charter for a new entity, Payward National Trust Company, to offer fiduciary custody. That application is pending.

Products and integrations

Custody is built into Kraken Prime. Clients can trade or stake directly from custody, and assets pledged from a Kraken Custody vault can back a single credit line used across trading venues. Kraken lists more than 200 custody assets, among them BTC, ETH, SOL and TAO, along with tokenized stocks and ETFs such as AAPLx and SGOVx. On-chain staking covers ETH and TAO, and eligible institutional and high-net-worth clients can earn rewards on USD balances through the USDG program.

Named mandates include the reserve assets behind Ethena's USDe, which the Ethena Risk Committee approved Kraken to hold in January 2026. In June 2026 Janus Henderson's AAA CLO strategy, tokenized as JAAA through Centrifuge, became the first real-world asset in Kraken Custody, and Kraken said several digital asset treasury companies picked it for custody and trading in the third quarter of 2025. Institutional clients get a Custody REST API after onboarding through a Kraken account manager, and Prime adds FIX 4.4 and WebSocket connections.