Kraken’s parent company Payward continues its acquisition spree. Yesterday, the company announced it is buying Reap, a Hong Kong-based stablecoin card and payments infrastructure provider, for up to $600 million.
Since early 2025, Payward has spent north of $2.7 billion on M&A:
03/25: NinjaTrader ($1.5 billion, retail futures trading)
10/25: Small Exchange ($100 million, CFTC-licensed derivatives)
12/25: Backed (undisclosed, tokenized equities)
02/26: Magna (undisclosed, token management platform)
04/26: Bitnomial (~$550 million, options exchange)
If you’re wondering who Reap is: the company was founded by a former Stripe employee, processes over $6 billion annually in stablecoin-linked card payments, holds Visa principal memberships across Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico, and Ireland, and serves, according to its own statements, 22,000+ businesses.
For Kraken, this marks another step toward building a full-stack financial platform spanning trading, custody, derivatives, tokenized equities, onchain settlement and stablecoin services. It’s about keeping the user inside one ecosystem while stopping value from leaking out at the edges.
It also helps diversify the business away from the cyclical nature of crypto trading. Coinbase’s Q1 earnings yesterday made the point clearly. Transaction revenue, still the company’s largest segment, dropped 40% year-over-year, pulling total revenue down 31%.
Kraken, which confidentially filed for an IPO last year and has been waiting for the right window since, knows this. A diversified revenue mix isn’t just a good product strategy, but also the right IPO narrative.
In today’s Briefing:
Solana & State Street take the spotlight in Miami
Bullish buys transfer agent Equiniti in $4.2 billion deal
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Bullish buys Equiniti for $4.2 billion. The deal gives the institutional digital assets platform control of a leading global transfer agent serving nearly 3,000 issuers and processing more than $500 billion in annual transaction volume. The deal, comprising $2.35 billion in Bullish stock and $1.85 billion in assumed debt, is expected to close in January next year. 🤝
Coinbase cuts 14% of staff. In a statement shared by CEO Brian Armstrong, the company said the decision, which affects ~700 employees, was driven by the prolonged crypto downturn and the growing impact of AI. 📉
Crypto venture funds announce mega raises. On Monday, Haun Ventures announced that it had raised a $1 billion investment fund. The following day, a16z crypto introduced Fund 5, raising $2.2 billion. 💰
MoonPay acquires Solana trading infrastructure platform DFlow. The $100 million acquisition expands the payments firm’s existing stack with crypto trading capabilities. It marks MoonPay’s sixth acquisition since the start of 2025. 💸
Bitwise announces inaugural tokenized fund. The asset manager will effectively take over management of the Crypto Carry Fund (USCC) from tokenization platform Superstate, which currently holds around $260 million in AUM. The Bitwise Crypto Carry Fund (USCC) will continue to seek yield through the crypto cash-and-carry trade, a strategy that captures the spread between spot and futures prices for major crypto assets. 🪙
TOP STORY
Miami Recap: Solana & State Street Take the Spotlight
Miami calling: This week, the digital assets industry gathered in Miami for CoinDesk’s annual Consensus conference and Solana’s Accelerate USA event. For Solana specifically, the week delivered a wave of major announcements, from investment giant State Street launching its first onchain cash management product to digital assets exchange Bullish tokenizing its entire cap table on the network.
Why it matters: Solana remains one of the leading blockchain networks across key metrics, including total RWA value secured, network revenue, and spot trading volumes. But as digital assets move further into the mainstream, maintaining that lead is becoming increasingly difficult. A growing number of specialized networks are emerging to challenge Solana in specific verticals, from Hyperliquid in trading and Canton Network in institutional RWAs to Tempo in stablecoin payments and agentic commerce.
Competitive positioning: Viewed through this lens, many of the announcements made in Miami can be seen as efforts to strengthen Solana’s position across some of the industry’s most important growth areas:
Trading: Jito, Solana’s leading infrastructure provider, unveiled JTX, a new consumer-facing app for spot trading, perpetual futures, and prediction markets that is set to launch in July.
Agentic commerce: In collaboration with Google Cloud, the Solana Foundation introduced Pay.sh, enabling AI agents to pay for selected Google services using stablecoins on Solana.
Institutional adoption: The biggest announcement, however, came from State Street Investment Management, the global asset manager with $5.7 trillion in AUM, which launched its first tokenized product on Solana. First announced in December last year and developed in partnership with Galaxy, the Liquidity Sweep Fund (SWEEP) is a tokenized private liquidity fund designed to enable 24/7 onchain cash management via stablecoins.
How it works: Similar to a sweep account in traditional finance, the fund is designed to generate yield on idle cash reserves. Firms can subscribe using stablecoins such as USDC and PYUSD, or USD via Fedwire. Under the hood, the fund allocates to short-duration instruments including U.S. Treasury bills, Treasury-backed repos, and USD stablecoins.
Not a money market fund: SWEEP differs from traditional tokenized money market funds in several important ways. First, it is not a registered money market fund, limiting access to Qualified Purchasers. The minimum investment is $5 million for entities and $1 million for individuals.
Optimized for liquidity: The second difference is structural. Unlike traditional tokenized money market funds, SWEEP does not allocate all assets directly into yield-bearing instruments. Instead, it keeps a portion of the portfolio in stablecoins, enabling near-instant, 24/7 subscriptions and redemptions without requiring the fund to liquidate Treasury positions.
Distribution play: Beyond improving cash mobility, launching on a public network such as Solana gives State Street access to an investor and liquidity base that looks very different from its traditional client base. The initial customer set is expected to include crypto funds, stablecoin issuers, and treasury teams at crypto-native firms, which already manage capital onchain and sit outside State Street’s conventional distribution channels.
Broader rollout: Looking ahead, SWEEP is expected to expand beyond Solana, with Ethereum and Stellar reportedly next in line. The roadmap also extends to a broader onchain product suite, which State Street plans to build out over the coming months and years.
"We have an ambitious pipeline of tokenized products planned for 2026 and beyond, as we expect an increasing share of capital to move from traditional brokerage and custody accounts into digital wallets," Kim Hochfeld, Global Head of Digital and Cash at State Street Investment Management, told Blockstories.
Jorge Schnura is President at Keyrock Asset Management, the asset and wealth management arm of Keyrock, a global digital asset market maker and financial services firm.
Where does SWEEP fit in the emerging market for onchain cash management?
Onchain cash management is developing across distinct product categories, each with different characteristics and target markets.
For institutions that need a registered or quasi-registered wrapper, vanilla tokenized money market funds such as BlackRock’s BUIDL are the natural entry point.
For crypto-native players such as DAO treasuries, yield-bearing stablecoins like sUSDS or sUSDe are more attractive, because they offer instant liquidity, higher yield, and DeFi composability, albeit with higher risks.
In Europe, products such as Spiko occupy another niche: a UCITS-style money market fund that is accessible to SMEs and structured in a way European corporate treasurers can actually buy without a structuring detour.
SWEEP sits closest to the first bucket. It does not compete on yield or composability. Its edge is combining 24/7 liquidity with State Street’s brand. For a CFO making a first onchain allocation, that matters more than a few basis points of yield.
An underestimated risk, however, is the stablecoin rail. Subscribing through stablecoins means the redemption path partly depends on the stablecoin’s liquidity, market depth, and depeg behavior. This is a different risk surface from holding T-bills directly through traditional infrastructure.
Still, this risk is unlikely to be the main bottleneck for adoption. Initial demand will likely come from treasuries that already operate onchain: exchanges, custodians, and large market makers that need to move collateral on weekends, rebalance positions overnight, and earn yield on idle stablecoin balances outside banking hours. Over the next 12 to 24 months, fintechs and neobanks holding stablecoin float could follow.
Nick Ducoff is Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation, where he oversees the network’s strategy for onboarding major financial institutions and real-world assets.
Looking ahead to the next 12 months, which verticals or use cases will be most strategically important to Solana’s ecosystem growth?
Solana’s ecosystem is largely organized around four areas: Institutional, DeFi, Payments, and Consumer. DeFi brings liquidity, payments move value, consumer applications create the front-end experiences, and institutional activity brings assets like tokenized stocks, funds, RWAs, and stablecoins onto public rails.
The emphasis is on use cases where Solana’s high throughput and low latency shine most. Global payments and agentic commerce are high on that list because both depend on cheap, fast, always-on settlement. Trading applications such as perpetuals and prediction markets are also a natural fit because they benefit from low latency and real-time execution. And to make these applications on Solana even more powerful, we continue to push toward reducing slot times from 400ms to 150ms.
On the institutional side, Solana already has over $2.25 billion in RWAs and volume is growing rapidly. As more assets move onchain, investors globally gain broader access to products and barriers to entry come down — all while assets remain connected to the same liquidity environment powering DeFi, payments, and consumer applications.
Aave: Head of Risk, London 🇬🇧
AllUnity: Risk Manager, Frankfurt 🇩🇪
Bybit: Government Relations Manager, Europe 🇪🇺
Circle: Principal Product Manager - Onchain FX, Remote 🌐
Monad Foundation: Quantitative Researcher, Remote 🌐
Mysten Labs: DeFi Engineer, Remote 🌐
Spiko: Institutional Sales, Paris 🇫🇷
In two weeks, we’re back on tour with the launch of the Blockstories Horizon 2026 Summer Series, kicking off in Madrid on May 21 before continuing to Amsterdam for our Money20/20 Summit.
Join us and our partners from Visa, Bitwise, Steakhouse Financial, ABN AMRO and others for exclusive evening events exploring the top trends in digital assets over the next 12 to 18 months.
Kalshi | $1 billion | Series F : Leading U.S. prediction market.
OpenTrade | $17 million | Strategic : Infrastructure provider enabling traditional fintechs to access onchain yield-bearing assets.
OnRe | $5 million | Series A : Onchain reinsurance company.
Elastics | $2 million | Pre-Seed : Startup developing AI agents specialized in trading prediction markets.
Unpacking Aave (Galaxy) — It’s no secret that a large share of Aave’s TVL comes from leveraged looped positions. But getting a complete picture of Aave’s loan book, and quantifying the extent of this activity, has historically been difficult. Now, Galaxy Research has run the numbers and, according to its findings, looped loans account for roughly 60% of borrows and are highly leveraged.
Stablecoins, the GENIUS Act, and the Evolving Structure of Dollar Finance (Galaxy) — Banks have warned that stablecoins could drain deposits and reduce credit creation. In a report published yesterday, Galaxy put that claim into numbers. And while some U.S. deposits really do migrate, the figures suggest that for every $1 leaving U.S. deposits, nearly $2 enters the banking system from abroad.
What do you think of today's briefing?
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.
