Not long ago, crypto firms in Europe were happy just to get a bank account. Now Kraken is asking for the whole bank.
On Wednesday, Kraken’s parent Payward signed a deal to acquire Saldo Bank, a Lithuanian lender with €163 million in assets that turned its first profit last year.
Payward would become the first crypto company to buy a bank in the EU. The price is undisclosed, and the ECB and the Bank of Lithuania still have to approve the deal before it closes in 2027.
Saldo’s whole balance sheet is worth less than half a percent of the $40 billion clients hold on Kraken, which tells you what Payward is really paying for: the license. Its Irish e-money license lets Kraken hold client euros, but only in safeguarded accounts where the funds can neither earn interest nor be lent out. A bank can do both, comes with €100,000 of deposit insurance and can passport it all across the EEA.
Payward is unusually frank about the goal: “Whoever has the right to deposit, lend to, and issue payment instruments to a customer owns the relationship.” Today, a typical Kraken customer in Europe gets paid into a bank account, keeps savings and a card there, and sends money to Kraken to trade. With its own bank, Payward could flip that order:
Cash parked between trades would earn interest at Kraken instead of going back to the customer’s bank.
Customers could borrow against their holdings instead of selling them, and the assets would stay on the platform.
Interest and lending income would cushion slow trading quarters.
And euro payments would run over Payward’s own SEPA access, which no partner bank can switch off.
One catch, though. Saldo’s license excludes investment services, so the crypto would sit next to the bank.
For the past two years, crypto exchanges have been racing to become “everything exchanges”, adding stocks, derivatives, prediction markets and tokenized assets to their order books. With the trading menu nearly complete, the goalposts are moving to broader financial services and, ultimately, to the customer’s primary account.
Payward has pursued both, mostly by buying. Since early 2025, Payward has added a U.S. futures broker (NinjaTrader), a tokenized-stock issuer (Backed), a derivatives exchange with its own clearinghouse (Bitnomial) and a stablecoin card company (Reap). Saldo Bank would be the next piece of the puzzle.
IN TODAY’S BRIEFING:
Ledger suffers supply-chain attack
21shares brings Anthropic pre-IPO exposure to Europe’s ETP market
WITH INSIGHTS FROM
Adrian
Fritz
21shares
Claude
Donzé
Greenfield
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Ledger suffers supply-chain attack. Attackers purchased genuine Ledger devices, installed hidden implants beneath their screens, and redistributed them. The implants captured users’ recovery phrases and transmitted them via LTE using an eSIM. Onchain analysts estimate losses of ~$80 million across hundreds of wallets. Ledger said it is cooperating with law enforcement to identify the attackers. Separately, the company unveiled Ledger Atom yesterday, a smartphone-like hardware wallet that runs Android apps while keeping private keys isolated in a dedicated security chip. 🥷
Mastercard and BVNK launch Global Money Platform. The platform combines BVNK’s stablecoin infrastructure with Mastercard’s payment network, allowing banks, fintechs and enterprises to offer multi-currency accounts, fiat-stablecoin conversions, global payouts and stablecoin-linked cards through a single API. Nuvei and Marqeta are among the first companies planning to integrate the platform. 🌐
Stripe and Plasma partner to develop multi-currency stablecoin cards. Plasma will serve as a design partner as Stripe expands its stablecoin card infrastructure to support multiple fiat currencies, including USD, EUR and BRL, alongside USDC and other stablecoins. The aim is to let users spend directly in the currencies they hold, reducing conversions and FX costs. 💳
TOP STORY
Pre-IPO meets ETP: On Tuesday, crypto-native ETP issuer 21shares listed its Anthropic Synthetic ETP (CLAU) on the Vienna MTF, a trading venue operated by Wiener Börse. The product gives investors synthetic economic exposure to the valuation of Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, using prices from crypto markets. Like any other ETP, it can be held in a regular securities account.
Why it matters: Companies are staying private far longer than they used to. U.S. companies now go public at a median age of 12 to 14 years, against five to six in 1999 and 2000, so most of their value growth goes to venture funds and institutional investors before retail investors can buy in at the IPO. Crypto firms have tried to close that gap, from pre-IPO perpetual futures on exchanges such as Binance to tokenized products from players like Ondo. 21shares takes a third route and packages the exposure as an ETP, which requires neither a crypto exchange account nor a wallet.
How it works: This third route, however, still runs through the first one, as CLAU ultimately draws its exposure from pre-IPO perpetual futures on crypto exchanges:
Investors buy a certificate issued by 21shares x FalconX Limited, a new special purpose vehicle (SPV) that 21shares set up for synthetic products.
The SPV passes the investors’ money on to FalconX, the crypto prime broker that acquired 21shares in 2025. As a debt instrument, the note obligates FalconX to repay Anthropic’s current price whenever an investor redeems.
To cover that commitment, FalconX buys pre-IPO perpetual futures on Anthropic, contracts that track the company’s expected valuation.
Because Anthropic has no listed share price, data provider Kaiko calculates the reference price that CLAU tracks, based on trading in Binance’s Anthropic perpetuals contract.
After the IPO: CLAU will not convert into Anthropic shares once the company lists, which according to Bloomberg could happen before the end of November. Instead, the perps’ reference price will switch to Anthropic’s listed share price, and the product will keep trading as a synthetic tracker of the stock.
A young market: For now, CLAU depends on a market that is only a few months old. Binance launched its Anthropic contract on 2 June 2026, and open positions in it were worth around $42.5 million on Thursday, a small amount for a company valued in the trillions.
“The perps market is still relatively young, with limited market depth in certain areas, which can lead to higher volatility, wider spreads and larger tracking deviations,” Adrian Fritz, Chief Investment Strategist at 21shares, told Blockstories.
What investors pay: Fees open a second, more predictable gap between CLAU and its reference price. Investors pay a 1% annual management fee and a 2% exit fee, and they also carry the funding cost of the perpetual futures behind the product, a payment that long holders such as FalconX make to the other side every eight hours. 21shares deducts these payments from CLAU’s net asset value, so all investors share them.
A separate track: These early limitations are part of why 21shares treats CLAU as new territory and largely as an experiment. The issuer has kept the product away from its physically backed crypto ETPs and placed it in the new SPV instead.
“We launched a second SPV to bring new, innovative products to market, starting with CLAU. One reason is to clearly separate our physically backed crypto ETPs from derivative-based products, allowing investors to better understand their different structures and risk profiles,” Fritz said.
The FalconX factor: That 21shares can offer such a product at all goes back to FalconX’s acquisition. Since the deal closed in late 2025, the two firms have spent close to a year combining 21shares’ ETP issuance and distribution with FalconX’s trading and derivatives capabilities.
“With FalconX’s expertise in derivatives and perps trading, CLAU was a perfect example of where we can work with our parent company. Anthropic is only the first example, and over time we could also bring further pre-IPO products or yield-generating vaults to market through regulated instruments that traditional investors already understand,” Fritz added.
Outlook: 21shares has not yet committed to specific launches. For now, it is focused on widening CLAU's reach, as the product trades only on the Vienna MTF, a venue many banks and brokers are not connected to.
“Vienna MTF was the quickest to support us in bringing CLAU live. While it is a smaller trading venue, we want to cross-list CLAU on larger European exchanges as soon as possible, so even more investors can access it,” Fritz said.
The pressure: BlackRock and Fidelity have turned spot bitcoin and ether into a scale business at fees of 0.15% to 0.25%. IBIT alone holds $66.4 billion of the $106 billion in US spot bitcoin ETFs, and even in Europe, where crypto-natives still lead on assets, BlackRock took $525 million of the $1.16 billion in first-half net inflows.
The response: The four largest crypto-native issuers are differentiating along two routes: differentiated ETPs and onchain investment strategies.
Bitwise and CoinShares are building onchain asset management. Bitwise acquired staking provider Chorus One, curates Morpho vaults and introduced automated portfolios of tokenized stocks (ATPs). CoinShares this week announced yield strategies inside Safe wallets.
Meanwhile, 21shares and Grayscale are expanding into differentiated ETPs, from 21shares’ synthetic Anthropic product to Grayscale’s staking and Zcash ETFs. CoinShares has also entered active management through its acquisition of quant manager Bastion, while 21shares plans to follow.
The bigger picture: U.S. and UK regulators have shortened the path to market, with generic listing standards, staking inside US ETFs and the reopening of crypto ETNs to UK retail investors creating new opportunities for differentiated ETPs. At the same time, tokenization provides a multi-year structural tailwind for onchain asset management. Most of these products are still small, though, and 21shares chief executive Russell Barlow expects “consolidation in the medium term”, especially for the long tail of ETP issuers.
Claude Donzé is Principal and Consumer Lead at Greenfield Capital, a leading European crypto VC firm with investments in companies such as Near, 1Inch and Arweave.
Which other onchain exposures could institutions offer through regulated wrappers?
Vaults are the most concrete area of institutional interest we’re seeing, and some are already exploring how to offer onchain yields to clients. However, for many, launching such a product only makes commercial sense at $50–100 million in expected AUM.
Beyond vaults, perpetuals could underpin more pre-IPO products tied to companies like OpenAI, SpaceX or Revolut, potentially followed by products resembling a pre-IPO index. Other possibilities include leveraged single-stock exposure and synthetic markets for prices without liquid futures markets, such as compute or bandwidth.
Further out, even prediction-market positions could be wrapped into regulated products. Some specialized firms are already exploring this, although I don’t expect to see concrete launches anytime soon.
Aave: Director of Operations, Dublin 🇮🇪
Alpaca: Product Manager - Brokerage - UK, London 🇬🇧
Bitvavo: Lead Product Manager Crypto Custody, Amsterdam 🇳🇱
Ethereum Institutional: Head of Europe, Remote 🇪🇺
Kraken: Head of Exchange Infrastructure, Remote 🇪🇺
Morpho: Revenue Operations Manager, Remote 🌎
OKX: Head of Finance, Sliema 🇲🇹
Revolut: Crypto Institutions Sales Executive, Remote 🇪🇺
Tether: Head of Licensing and Regulatory Authorisations, Madrid 🇪🇸
Fission | $10 million | Series A : Liquidity provider for tokenized investment funds, giving eligible holders access to capital without waiting for fund redemption windows.
Multiliquid | $8 million | Seed : Settlement platform enabling instant, NAV-based conversions between tokenized assets and stablecoins on Ethereum and Solana.
Zaria | $5.2 million | Seed : Loan servicing and collateral management platform for structured finance and digital asset-backed lenders.
IMMIX | $3.5 million | Undisclosed : AI-powered stablecoin FX liquidity provider focused on currencies beyond the U.S. dollar.
EFY Finance | Undisclosed | Seed : Licensed stablecoin payments, custody, and on- and off-ramp provider across Latin America. Tether participated in this round.
State of Stablecoins and Payments, Q3 2026 (Allium) — In this report, research firm Allium found that stablecoin usage is growing much faster than supply: payments reached $482 billion through Q3, up 45%, while supply was nearly flat. Issuers are increasingly competing on distribution by integrating stablecoins into existing payment, treasury and financial workflows, while cards and agentic payments emerge as new spending channels.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Crypto Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.
