SoFi and Kraken Parent Payward Link Banking and Crypto Rails, With SoFiUSD Headed to Kraken
The partnership lists SoFi’s bank-issued stablecoin on Kraken, adds Payward to SoFi’s settlement network for round-the-clock dollar clearing, and routes SoFi’s digital-asset order flow through Kraken Prime.
SAN FRANCISCO — SoFi Technologies and Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, announced a partnership on Sept. 3 that ties together banking and digital-asset infrastructure from both companies. The deal has three parts: Kraken will list SoFiUSD, SoFi's bank-issued stablecoin, for retail, professional and institutional clients; Payward is joining the SoFi Exchange Network, the settlement system SoFi built for clearing U.S. dollar transactions; and SoFi will route digital-asset orders from its consumer app through Kraken Prime, Kraken's prime-brokerage service.
The stablecoin piece is the most consumer-visible element. SoFiUSD is described as redeemable one-to-one for U.S. dollars, and listing it on Kraken gives SoFi's stablecoin a trading venue and a path to liquidity outside SoFi's own app — the kind of distribution that has become a common early goal for bank-issued stablecoins, which are only as useful as the number of places they can be held, moved or traded.
The settlement piece is aimed at institutions rather than retail users. By joining the SoFi Exchange Network, Payward's institutional clients gain a way to clear and settle U.S. dollar transactions around the clock, including outside the hours traditional banking rails operate on — a persistent friction point for crypto-native trading firms that need to move fiat currency against digital-asset positions on a schedule that doesn't pause for bank holidays or overnight settlement windows.
The liquidity piece runs the other direction: SoFi will send its own customers' digital-asset orders through Kraken Prime, which uses smart order routing across multiple venues to seek better execution than a single exchange could offer on its own. That arrangement lets SoFi offer crypto trading inside its app without building or maintaining its own market-making and multi-venue liquidity infrastructure — the same build-versus-partner tradeoff that has shaped a wave of bank-crypto tie-ups this year.
Neither company has disclosed volume figures, revenue-sharing terms or a specific launch date for each piece of the arrangement, so the near-term significance is the infrastructure pairing itself: a consumer-facing fintech and a crypto-native exchange operator each getting access to a capability — distribution for one, dollar settlement rails and liquidity for the other — that would otherwise have taken each company longer to build independently.