Kraken’s parent has struck a $600 million deal to acquire Asian stablecoin company Reap

Payward, the company behind cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, is buying Rip Technologies for $600 million, using cash and stock valued at $20 billion.

Harvest Technologies is a Hong Kong fintech company focused on stablecoin-powered payment rails and tools that support global business-to-business financial transactions.

The acquisition is Payward's first infrastructure deal in Asia and will support new business-to-business products such as card issuance and stablecoin payments. CEO Arjun Sethi said Asia is the fastest-growing market outside of Europe, both in terms of revenue and assets on the platform, and Rip's potential could quickly expand to the US.

According to Sethi, the future of finance is being shaped by sustainable markets, programmable money and autonomous execution, with stablecoins as the main settlement infrastructure and AI agents playing a growing role in the ecosystem.

“Harvest is for the next payment layer. Card networks, bank rails and blockchains in one API, live in stablecoins, licensed from Hong Kong to Mexico. The infrastructure for that world must be open, controlled and implemented globally on day 1. The next financial product will not be collected. It will be transmitted,” he added.

Payward recently launched a B2B infrastructure platform that provides stablecoin payments, trading, lending and other crypto services to fintech companies, banks, brokers and businesses.

“Stablecoins are one of the biggest real-world applications for card payments today and Harvest is proud to lead the way. The global stablecoin and crypto-card market is now over $18 billion a year in revenue and will nearly triple in size by 2025, and we've expanded our license footprint from Asia to South America,” he said. It's about connecting energy volume, regulatory access and distribution to our customers with financial services. Joining Payward was a natural step to accelerate the future of finance and build category-disrupting offerings in web3, agent trading and more.

After ending its regulatory battle with the US SEC, the firm moved further to expand. The first major transaction in this new phase was the March 2025 acquisition of NinjaTrader, its largest acquisition to date.

The latest move comes after Payward entered into an agreement to acquire Bitnomial, the first fully CFTC-licensed crypto derivatives company.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.