Kraken Parent Payward to Buy CFTC‑Regulated Bitnomial

Payward, the parent company of the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, announced Friday it will acquire Bitnomial, a U.S.-licensed cryptocurrency and derivatives exchange. Bitnomial holds Commodity Futures Trading Commission permissions to operate as an exchange, clearinghouse and brokerage.

Payward said it plans to use Bitnomial’s CFTC-regulated infrastructure to expand derivatives trading options for U.S. residents and to offer institutional integrations that allow clients to provide crypto services to their customers. The company highlighted Bitnomial’s architecture for continuous trading and crypto collateral management as part of the acquisition rationale.

Arjun Sethi, co‑CEO of Payward and Kraken, wrote in the company announcement, “Bitnomial spent a decade building it: crypto settlement, crypto collateral, continuous 24/7 markets. These are capabilities that cannot be retrofitted onto legacy systems. They have to be built natively.” Payward said it will leverage those native capabilities rather than trying to retrofit them onto existing systems.

Markets moved after Iran’s foreign minister posted that the Strait of Hormuz would be open to commercial traffic for the remainder of the current ceasefire; the U.S. president also posted a confirmation. Bitcoin briefly reached $77,037 in intraday trading, about a 1% rise that followed roughly a 5% recovery for the week. Brent crude futures fell to about $85 per barrel, near a 10% drop on the news. The ceasefire between the United States, Israel and Iran is scheduled to expire on April 22.

Separately, the Ethereum Foundation said it funded a six‑month program supporting public-goods security work. Part of that funding went to the Ketman Project, which investigated fake identities in Web3 and reported finding 100 North Korean IT workers operating within Web3 organizations. The Ketman Project notified about 53 projects where those operatives may have been employed.

The acquisition gives Payward exchange and clearinghouse permissions that enable cleared derivatives and custody-linked services in the U.S. Payward announced the deal on Friday; further regulatory approvals or implementation timelines were not disclosed.