In this bonus episode of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Market Development @ Tempo is joined by Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO @ Kraken &amp; Payward to discuss Payward as a parent company with Kraken &amp; NinjaTrader, consumer products Kraken Earn and MoneyGram cashout partnership and more! Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 2:45 Payward as parent company with Kraken &amp; NinjaTrader 3:44 xStocks one to one tokenized equities interoperable across chains 5:00 Binomial acquisition for US crypto perpetuals and commodities 9:29 Payward offering modular financial rails for fintech partners 14:25 Consumer products Kraken Earn and MoneyGram cashout partnership 20:18 Earn vaults offering yield strategies from treasury to high risk 23:10 Global regulation evolution with Europe leading and US complex 31:16 IPO ambitions and building adaptable multi product financial foundation *** This episode is brought to you by Visa A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto. *** We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research! Music by Henry McLean

Kraken Co-CEO Giving Everyone Billionaire Like Access to Finance

Tokenized

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Tokenized

## Participants

- **Simon Taylor** (Tempo)
- **Arjun Sethi** (Kraken & Payward)

## Transcript

MoneyGram now also, they made the announcement for their stablecoin. So what they're saying is that they want to be able to offer financial services style products to their customers. And so we want to be partners with them around staking that asset depending on the asset, letting people borrow against that asset if they want to, let them get better yields on that asset. And so, you know, everyone is building out financial products, but not everyone has financial rails.

And so we're going to do both, but we've already built our financial products on top of our rails. Now we can give these rails as payward services to anyone if they need it. Welcome to Tokenized, the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host for today, author of Fintech Brain Food and head of Market Dev at Tempo. And joining me is Oyun Sethi, the co-CEO of Kraken and Payward. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing well. How about yourself? Really well, my friend. Why don't we stop there?

Because I always see this Payward thing. Most people know who Kraken is, hopefully at this point, that are listening to this podcast. But what's Payward and how's it different? So the company's name actually is officially Payward, as always has been. And so there's a story to that, and I'll come back around in a second. And the first products that we built were the Kraken Exchange, where we listed Bitcoin, Ethereum. First ones to actually launch even the Euro pair, given that we're here in Europe.

And what we did over time in order to build consumer experiences and professional trading experiences is that we vertically integrated our own infrastructure with our applications. It's typically what a lot of companies do. But given that we built the exchange, the infrastructure, the payments rails, onboarding and offboarding, the KYC, AML, etc., etc.

What we decided to do over time is that, well, okay, well, how do we build a set of microservices very similar to what Amazon did for themselves with Amazon Web Services and then having Amazon Retail be a customer of AWS? We decided to do the same thing about two years ago, which is, okay, well, we have been building our first party apps and our exchange on our own infra. And how do we build a set of services that can support us, but now also a new set of customers and partners as well?

And the way to do it was that we had all, instead of saying this is, we believe that a set of customers will work with us. We already had a large set of customers that were already hooking onto the exchange, plugging into our APIs, leveraging liquidity, and sort of what I'd call jerry-rigging certain products in order to make it work.

So we went back to the first principles and say, okay, great, who are all these folks that are coming in using our e...

Kraken Co-CEO Giving Everyone Billionaire Like Access to Finance

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Kraken Co-CEO Giving Everyone Billionaire Like Access to Finance

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.