Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, and U.S. financial group SoFi Technologies entered into a strategic partnership to connect their digital asset trading and payment infrastructure.
Financial infrastructure platform Payward and U.S. technology company SoFi Technologies, which provides banking and financial services to 15.8 million customers, announced a partnership that will integrate the companies’ banking, payment, and crypto infrastructure.
The agreement includes:
- routing SoFi’s digital asset order flow to the Kraken Prime platform;
- connecting Payward to the SoFi Exchange Network (SEN), a settlement network that provides 24/7 real-time fiat settlement;
- listing the U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin SoFiUSD on the Kraken crypto exchange.
The Payward and SoFi partnership is expected to expand to include qualified custody services. Kraken Prime’s institutional and corporate clients will also gain access to SoFi Big Business Banking.
Kraken Prime is a platform for large companies and financial institutions that combines trading, digital asset custody, and financing. Launched in June 2025, it gives Kraken’s institutional clients access to more than 20 liquidity sources through a single service.
Kraken Prime will handle the execution of crypto orders for SoFi users. The platform uses a smart order routing system that analyzes prices and market depth across supported trading venues in real time and routes each order to the venue offering the best available execution terms.
As a result, SoFi gains access to aggregated liquidity across multiple venues instead of executing all client transactions through a single order book. The user experience in the app won’t change. Users will continue to buy and sell digital assets directly through the SoFi interface, while price discovery and order routing will be handled through Kraken Prime’s infrastructure.
Kraken has been actively expanding its partnerships with major traditional financial market participants. The crypto exchange partnered with Deutsche Börse on infrastructure for currency and derivatives transactions, with Mastercard to expand the use of crypto for everyday needs, with MoneyGram to simplify crypto-to-fiat conversions, and with Maple to launch an on-chain platform for loans backed by digital assets.
