Payward (@Payward) — Twitter Score 28 out of 1000

Payward is the parent company and unified financial infrastructure platform behind Kraken, co-founded by Jesse Powell and Thanh Luu. Payward's Twitter Score is 27 out of 1000 as of September 2026, ranking #35,469 (top 10%) among 486,860 tracked accounts.

Payward, formally incorporated as Payward, Inc., serves as the shared legal, technical and regulatory foundation across a growing suite of financial products. Its platform spans trading, custody, payments, yield, lending and market data across both digital and traditional assets. Beginning in 2025, Payward stepped into a more explicit public role as the infrastructure layer connecting multiple product interfaces, having previously operated largely behind the scenes. Affiliated products built on this shared infrastructure include Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, CF Benchmarks and Bitnomial, with shared liquidity, risk, collateral, settlement and compliance systems underpinning all of them.

Payward completed acquisitions of NinjaTrader, Breakout, Small Exchange and Capitalise.ai during 2025, and closed its acquisition of Backed in January 2026. In November 2025, Payward raised $800 million across two tranches, with the primary tranche drawing participation from Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital, HSG, Oppenheimer Alternative Investment Management, Tribe Capital and Arjun Sethi's family office. A subsequent $200 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities was executed at a $20 billion valuation. Also in November 2025, Payward confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 registration statement to the SEC for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. In 2026, Payward filed an application with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish a national trust company focused on institutional-grade digital-asset custody, with that application described as pending.

Payward has navigated several regulatory actions. In February 2023, Payward Ventures Inc. and Payward Trading Ltd., without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations, agreed to cease their U.S. crypto-asset staking-as-a-service program and pay $30 million in disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties to settle SEC charges. In November 2023, the SEC charged Payward Inc. and Payward Ventures Inc., together known as Kraken, alleging operation of an unregistered securities exchange, broker, dealer and clearing agency. On March 27, 2025, the SEC filed a joint stipulation dismissing that civil enforcement action against both entities with prejudice, noting the dismissal was not based on an assessment of the merits. Payward subsidiaries maintain a regulatory footprint spanning crypto, banking, payments, derivatives, securities and benchmark activities. Payward is governed by Co-CEOs Arjun Sethi and Dave Ripley, and is also affiliated with Kraken Ventures, an independent investment fund focused on early-stage crypto, fintech and DeFi that Kraken backed in 2021. Payward's account has published 47 posts and has 4,103 followers as of September 2026. Payward has been mentioned by 83 accounts a total of 143 times.

Who follows Payward on X?

The accounts that follow Payward include 89 founders, 24 angel investors and 40 influencers, among them Jesse Powell, H.E. Justin Sun, Kraken, mikedemarais.eth, DEGEN NEWS and Armani Ferrante.