Kraken just made a move that tightens its grip on the crypto capital stack. On Feb 18, 2026, Payward, Inc., the parent company behind Kraken, announced it acquired New York based token management...
Kraken just made a move that tightens its grip on the crypto capital stack. On Feb 18, 2026, Payward, Inc., the parent company behind Kraken, announced it acquired New York based token management platform Magna. The deal closed the prior Friday. Terms were not disclosed. This marks Kraken’s 6th acquisition in roughly 12 months, landing as the company reports $2.2B in adjusted 2025 revenue, carries a $20B valuation, and has already filed a confidential S-1. In a tightening startup ecosystem, that sequence is not random. It is orchestration.
Magna was founded in early 2022 by Bruno Faviero and Arun Kirubarajan after graduating from Y Combinator’s W22 batch. The premise was simple and overdue. Token companies had liquidity venues but lacked disciplined infrastructure for vesting, airdrops, grants, tax withholding, and custody workflows. Within weeks of launch in 2022, Magna managed more than $30M in distributions. By 2025, Bruno Faviero stated the platform had grown into the largest token vesting operation in the market, serving over 160 clients with a peak total value locked of $60B. In the startup ecosystem, infrastructure companies rarely trend. They compound.
Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward and Kraken, told Fortune the objective is to reach token issuers early in their life cycle instead of waiting until liquidity is on the table. In Kraken’s official statement, Arjun Sethi sharpened the point, warning that without reliable lifecycle infrastructure, markets consolidate around whoever controls distribution and access. With Magna, Kraken is not merely facilitating trades. It is embedding itself into fundraising, distribution, and liquidity as a single operating layer.
Calvin Leyon, Head of Onchain at Kraken, framed the acquisition as expanding institutional grade infrastructure from inception through scale. Look at the acquisition trail. NinjaTrader. Capitalise.ai. Breakout. The Small Exchange. Backed Finance. Futures, automation, derivatives, tokenized equities. Now token management. In a maturing startup ecosystem, vertical integration is how exchanges turn flow into leverage.
Magna’s precision is operational. 1 vesting contract per customer. SOC2 certifications. Integrations with Fireblocks and Anchorage. Support across Solana, Ethereum, Aptos, and EVM chains. More than 1M token recipients. Over $10B in transaction volume. Coinbase acquired Liquifi in Jul 2025. Anchorage acquired Hedgey in Dec 2025. With Magna absorbed, the 3 largest standalone token management platforms are no longer independent. That is consolidation with a clock.
Bruno Faviero previously sold his prior company to Palantir. Arun Kirubarajan, a former quant and machine learning researcher, updated his role to Chief Architect, Onchain at Kraken. Builders who understand systems tend to build systems that scale. Kraken relocated to Cheyenne, Wyoming in 2025, strengthened its balance sheet, and now controls infrastructure before tokens ever trade. In a startup ecosystem where liquidity used to be the finish line, Kraken is positioning itself at the starting block, and that shift redraws the power map in real time.