Payward, the parent company of Kraken, and SoFi Technologies have announced a partnership connecting banking, payments, and digital asset markets.
Under the arrangement, Payward is joining the SoFi Exchange Network's real-time settlement rails and listing SoFi's bank-issued stablecoin, SoFiUSD, on Kraken. SoFi will route its digital asset order flow through Kraken Prime for trade execution, with qualified custody capabilities expected to follow as the relationship develops. In turn, Kraken Prime's institutional and business clients will gain access to SoFi's Big Business Banking services and its SEN settlement network, which settles fiat currency in real time, 24 hours a day.
The function of prime brokerage
A prime broker sits between an institutional or corporate client and the market, handling execution, custody, and financing through a single relationship. In traditional finance, this is the model that firms such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley operate for hedge funds. Rather than holding direct accounts with every venue it wants to access, a client relies on the prime broker to aggregate access, manage collateral, and report on positions across venues.
In digital assets, the same structure addresses a similar operational problem. Without a prime broker, a trading desk routing flow to multiple venues would need to prefund each one separately, reconcile balances individually, and manage counterparty exposure venue by venue. Kraken Prime, which launched in 2025, combines trading and custody services on a single platform, allowing institutional clients or partners such as SoFi to deal with one counterparty instead of managing that fragmentation directly. The platform uses a smart order routing system that reads pricing and depth across supported venues in real time and directs each order to where it can be filled.
With this in mind, SoFi members who buy and sell crypto within the SoFi app will now have their orders routed through Kraken Prime, which seeks the available price across a range of venues rather than filling orders against a single order book. This gives SoFi access to a deeper liquidity pool than a single-venue setup would provide, which the companies say translates into improved pricing for customers without any change to the app's interface.
Part of a wider pattern
The SoFi arrangement extends a series of institutional relationships Kraken has built in traditional finance, including with Deutsche Börse on foreign exchange and derivatives infrastructure, Nasdaq on an equity token gateway powered by xStocks, and Franklin Templeton on tokenising its exchange-traded funds. Each represents a different point of entry into the same convergence between digital asset infrastructure and traditional financial products: tokenised equities through Nasdaq, fund infrastructure through Franklin Templeton, foreign exchange and derivatives through Deutsche Börse, and retail banking distribution through SoFi, a nationally chartered bank with 15.8 million members.
For SoFi customers, the change in execution infrastructure is expected to remain invisible; the visible effect, according to the companies, will be improved pricing on transactions already taking place within the app.
