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Payward Acquires Magic Labs Embedded Wallet Business
Payward Acquires Magic Labs Embedded Wallet Business

Transaction Overview
On July 27, 2026, Payward, the B2B crypto infrastructure parent behind the crypto exchange Kraken, announced a definitive agreement to acquire wallet-as-a-service business Magic Labs. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Target: Magic Labs (Wallet Infrastructure)
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, Magic Labs is a wallet-as-a-service infrastructure provider that enables businesses to create non-custodial embedded wallets for their end users. The company was co-founded by Sean Li, Arthur Jen, and Jaemin Jin.

Magic’s core offering is a developer-facing SDK and API that provides embedded wallets with passwordless authentication via email, social login, passkeys, or SSO. The product suite includes 1) API Wallets for server-side management with security and customizable key sharding, and 2) Embedded Wallets for client-side non-custodial key management. As of July 2026, the platform supports more than 30 blockchain networks and provides a white-label UI, fiat onramps, and transaction signing.

As of July 2026, Magic Labs had provisioned more than 60 million wallets and served more than 200,000 developers across more than 18,000 applications. Clients include Polymarket, Naver, Helium, Forbes, WalletConnect, Mattel, and Immutable. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Polymarket processed over $3 billion in prediction market transactions with zero downtime, powered by Magic’s embedded wallets. Magic said it had supported over $8.9 billion in cumulative transaction volume for Polymarket as of November 2025.

Magic Labs has raised a total of $83 million in disclosed venture funding across 4 rounds, with significant investors including PayPal Ventures, Northzone, Tiger Global, Digital Currency Group, CoinFund, and Placeholder VC.

In November 2024, Magic Labs announced Newton, a chain unification network built in collaboration with Polygon Labs, expanding beyond wallet infrastructure into cross-chain protocol development. In November 2025, Magic Labs integrated the Newton Protocol SDK across its developer network. The company described Newton Protocol as “the authorization layer for on-chain finance.” These moves preceded the company’s decision to divest its wallet business and refocus entirely on protocol development.

Buyer: Payward
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, Payward is a private B2B crypto infrastructure holding company. Payward operates Kraken, one of the longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges, alongside NinjaTrader, xStocks, Bitnomial, and CF Benchmarks. The company is led by co-CEOs Arjun Sethi and Dave Ripley.

Most relevant to this transaction, Payward operates Payward Services, a B2B infrastructure platform that provides institutions with access to Payward’s trading, custody, settlement, and payments infrastructure via API. The acquisition of Magic Labs adds embedded wallet infrastructure to their offering. In April 2026, Payward launched a white-label fiat-to-crypto onramp through a partnership with Onramper, making embedded wallet infrastructure a natural adjacent capability.

Payward has been expanding beyond its core exchange through acquisition. In 2025, the company acquired NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion (retail futures, M&A Alert) and agreed to acquire Backed Finance (tokenized equities, Press). In 2026, it acquired Magna (token lifecycle management, Press), completed the acquisition of Bitnomial for up to $550 million (regulated derivatives, M&A Alert), and agreed to acquire Reap for $600 million (card issuance and payments, M&A Alert). Including this transaction, Payward has announced or completed 8 acquisitions since early 2025, committing several billion dollars to platform expansion ahead of its planned public listing.

For the full year of 2025, Payward reported adjusted revenue of $2.2 billion, a 33% increase year over year from $1.5 billion in 2024. Trading-based revenue accounted for 47% of the total, with the remaining 53% from asset-based services, including payments, custody, yield, and financing.

In November 2025, Payward raised $800 million at a $20 billion post-money valuation in a round backed by Citadel Securities, Jane Street, and Apollo Global Management, and confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC ahead of a planned IPO. In April 2026, Deutsche Börse Group made an additional $200 million strategic investment in the company.

Transaction Parameters
Payward has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the wallet-as-a-service business of Magic Labs for an undisclosed amount. The transaction includes Magic Labs’ embedded wallet business, including wallet clients and associated infrastructure.

The transaction is part of a broader corporate restructuring in which Magic Labs is rebranding as Newton Labs to focus on the Newton Protocol. The two companies will remain independent following the close.

Architect Partners served as the exclusive financial advisor to Magic Labs.

Strategic Rationale
Payward is acquiring Magic’s embedded wallet business to augment Payward Services’ B2B offering. Payward Services gives partners a single integration point for trading, custody, tokenized assets, on/off-ramps, and derivatives. The wallet, the account layer where end users actually hold assets and interact with onchain products, was a critical piece partners still had to source from a third party. Magic brings that layer in-house with proven infrastructure: a TEE-based signing solution, an embedded integration layer, and a developer SDK that together have provisioned more than 60 million wallets and supported over $10 billion in stablecoin volume for 200,000+ developers.

On Day 1, Payward can offer fintechs, enterprises, and financial institutions a complete embedded onchain offering under a single provider, spanning wallet provisioning, onboarding, funding, trading, custody, and settlement, without stitching together multiple vendors. Every embedded wallet also becomes a distribution point that routes transaction volume into the rest of Payward’s infrastructure, deepening the non-trading, less volatile revenue that already accounts for 53% of Payward’s total as it heads toward a public listing.

Architect Partners’ Observations
This transaction marks the near-completion of a consolidation wave in embedded wallet infrastructure. In roughly one year, Fireblocks acquired Dynamics ($90M), Consensys acquired Web3Auth ($50M), Stripe acquired Privvy, Ripple acquired Palisade, and Paxos acquired Fordefi. Now each group has its own independent wallet infrastructure provider, and Payward has acquired the category’s pioneer. The market has reached a clear verdict: embedded wallets are foundational infrastructure for every onchain product, and they are a layer of a full-stack platform rather than a standalone business.

The logic is simple: the wallet is becoming the account primitive of onchain finance. Whoever provisions the wallet sits at the front of the customer relationship and routes the volume that follows. For platforms whose trading revenue is inherently cyclical, owning the onboarding layer converts market position into durable, recurring B2B infrastructure revenue.

Sources
Press Release, Payward Services, PitchBook

Alerts

Coinbase Acquires One River Digital Asset Management

Ayush Mishra
March 3rd, 2023

Transaction Overview

On March 3rd, 2023 Coinbase announced the acquisition of the digital asset management firm, One River for an undisclosed amount. 

 

Target: One River Digital Asset Management

One River Digital Asset Management (ORDAM) is an SEC-registered, cryptocurrency investment management and advisory firm. The company offers institutional investors access to digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, other cryptocurrencies, and blockchain-related companies. It’s based in Greenwich, Connecticut with additional offices in New York and Singapore. One River is split into two primary investment vehicles: the One River Digital Asset Fund and the One River Digital Bitcoin Fund. These offer institutional clients investment solutions, and advisory services, and implement their proprietary trading algorithms to create value for their clients.

 

One River’s closest competitors are other digital asset management firms such as Grayscale, WisdomTree, Bitwise Asset Management, Coinbase Asset Management, Fidelity Digital Assets, and ARK Invest.

 

The company was founded in 2019 by Eric Peters and Sebastian Bea. Both founders have extensive experience in the finance and technology fields. Peters and Bea lead the firm’s ~50 employees. One River has also ventured into the carbon-neutral Bitcoin space by launching a firm that focuses on mitigating the environmental impacts of Bitcoin mining. One River has raised $56M in capital over two rounds, with the latest round from September 2021 at a $186M post-money valuation. Former investors include Goldman Sachs (lead), Infinity Capital Partners, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and Coinbase Ventures. 

 

Buyer: Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN)

Coinbase is one of the largest players in the cryptocurrency exchange and digital asset space. The company is well-known with 110 million users in over 100 countries. Coinbase also provides a variety of institutional-grade services for finance professionals in the digital asset industry including an institutional trading platform, custody solutions, and prime brokerage services. Coinbase is one of the first cryptocurrency exchanges to go public, and the company is listed on the NASDAQ, with a current equity value of $14.5B and an EV / LTM revenue multiple of 4.1x. 

 

Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. Armstrong is the current CEO, leading the firm’s ~3,000 employees. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has offices in New York, Chicago, Tokyo, and London. 

 

Coinbase has been a leading acquirer in the crypto space, previously acquiring FairX (2022), BtcTurk (2022), Unbound Security (2021), BRD (2021), Bison Trails (2021), and Tagomi (2020).

 

Transaction Parameters

ORDAM, a subsidiary of One River Asset Management, was acquired by Coinbase for an undisclosed amount. ORDAM will transition to become Coinbase Asset Management (CBAM).

 

Comparable digital asset management transactions include Huobi | About Capital Management, Blockchain.com | Altonomy ($250M), Gemini | Omniex, Deutsche Borse | Crypto Finance ($108M).

 

Strategic Rationale

Often, buyers and sellers have an existing relationship, which holds true in this case. Coinbase invested in One River’s Series A and had been a close partner for several years leading up to this acquisition, demonstrating the “Acquire your Acquirer” approach to driving premium value M&A. Coinbase followed this road and found a natural way to expand their product scope and firm strategy while still focused on the crypto industry.

 

Specifically, this transaction fulfills two strategic rationales:

  1. Continued investment in the institutional business line. Expanding their institutional offering through ODAM’s Separately Managed Account (SMA), Coinbase can continue to offer additional services to their growing segment. Coinbase has increasingly become institutionally focused, with 80% of trading volumes in 2022 being institutional and roughly 25% of the 100 largest hedge funds in the world by assets under management are Coinbase customers. 
  2. Recurring revenue. Pricing for SMAs is asset-based, so the revenue is a (relatively) consistent flow and can help diversify from the volatile trading revenue.  

 

Architect Partners’ Observations

Crypto-focused asset management is a very narrow tightrope to traverse.  With the SEC’s continued rejection of Bitcoin-based Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and recent messaging of the “qualified custody” requirement of crypto for wealth managers, regulatory uncertainty is a damper on the sector. Institutionally focused products, such as ORDAM’s, are an area that has more leeway.  While there are other firms with a similar focus, many have plateaued in growth.  While there are other asset manager players, will this prompt others to find a new home in a larger firm?

 

This transaction also signals a future vision of what exchanges may become – all-encompassing financial services firms (much like many, many other TradFi firms). Coinbase’s sole dedication to the crypto sector is becoming a differentiator in itself.

 

Sources 

PitchBook, Coinbase Website, One River Website, Press Release