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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

Exodus to Acquire Baanx for $175M

Ryan McCulloch
November 26th, 2025
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Transaction Overview

On November 24, 2025, Exodus announced a definitive agreement to acquire W3C Corp, the parent of Baanx.com Ltd, Baanx US Corp, and Monavate, for total consideration of $175M. The transaction is expected to close in early 2026, subject to customary regulatory approvals in the U.S., UK, and EU.

 

Target: Baanx

Baanx is a UK‑based crypto payments and digital banking infrastructure provider focused on enabling users to buy, spend, and borrow against digital assets via virtual and physical payment cards. The company operates under an Electronic Money Institution license from the UK Financial Conduct Authority and supports programs across the UK, EU, and U.S., providing compliant rails for crypto‑linked spend at millions of merchant locations.​

 

Baanx offers API‑driven card issuing, on‑chain spending features, and credit products for wallets, exchanges, and Web3 applications, including the Exodus Card program launched earlier in 2025. It has also partnered with major Web3 and hardware wallet brands such as MetaMask and Ledger, positioning Baanx as a preferred bridge between self‑custody environments and traditional card networks.

 

The company has raised a total of $40M in equity financing over five rounds at a last post-money valuation of $97M on their Feb 2023 raise. Previous investors include Chiron Investment Management, Ledger, Blockchain Founders Fund, BlocTech Investment Group, BnkToTheFuture, British Business Bank, Monsas, Penu Investments, Primalnvest Capital Management, Tezos, and Warisan Investment Partners.

 

Baanx competes with other crypto card and payments platforms that bridge digital assets into everyday spend, including consumer‑facing programs such as Crypto.com Visa Card, Coinbase Card, Binance Card, Nexo Card, BitPay Card, and Revolut’s crypto‑enabled debit offering

 

Buyer: Exodus

Exodus Movement (NYSE American) is a U.S.-listed, self‑custodial crypto wallet offering integrated swapping (XO Swap) to a user base exceeding 6 million as of 2025. The company is currently building towards becoming a full‑stack crypto payments company via the acquisition of Grateful and now Baanx. 

 

As of November 26, 2025, Exodus has a market capitalization of $505M cash and crypto of $315M, and an enterprise value of $190M. Their LTM revenue was $127M, implying an EV / LTM revenue multiple of 1.5x. This is very modest relative to their peers of Coinbase and Gemini who trade at 6.6x and 9.0x EV / LTM revenue, respectively.

 

The day following the announcement, Exodus stock traded up about 5% upon open, indicating a positive market reaction to the acquisition, and within two days the stock had increased 17%.  

 

By acquiring Baanx, Exodus expects to integrate issuing, processing, and compliance infrastructure directly into both its consumer wallet and enterprise products, including programmable payout capabilities for XO Swap clients. This will allow Exodus to issue branded payment cards on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, expand geographic coverage across the U.S., UK, and EU, and support a wider range of assets including payment‑focused stablecoins.

 

Transaction Parameters

Exodus has agreed to acquire W3C Corp, the parent of Baanx and Monavate, for total consideration of approximately $175M, payable in cash and funded through a combination of Exodus’s balance‑sheet liquidity and a Bitcoin‑backed credit facility arranged with Galaxy Digital. 

 

Ahead of signing, Exodus extended a $58.8M loan to W3C to support its earlier acquisitions of Baanx and Monavate and may provide up to an additional $10M of working capital, with the remainder of the purchase price to be settled at closing. 

 

At Exodus’s current share price, the transaction value represents roughly 40% of the company’s equity market capitalization and is broadly in line with its implied enterprise value, making the deal very significant to Exodus. The acquisition is expected to close in early 2026, subject to customary regulatory and closing conditions across the U.S., UK, and EU.

 

Comparable previous transactions include: Rail | Ripple (M&A Alert), First Digital | Fireblocks (M&A Alert), Diem | Silvergate (M&A Alert), Alloyx | Solowin (M&A Alert), Iron | Moonpay (M&A Alert), Bridge | Stripe (M&A Alert).

 

Strategic Rationale

Owning Baanx’s card and payments stack transforms Exodus from a partner‑dependent wallet into a regulated payments company. Baanx’s EMI license, multi‑region regulatory footprint, and card‑network connectivity are difficult‑to‑replicate assets that accelerate Exodus’s time‑to‑market in regulated payments.

 

The combined platform will diversify Exodus’ revenues and enable them to monetize through interchange, FX, and enterprise payment services. They are now enabling everyday stablecoin and crypto spending from a self‑custodial environment. Exodus has been promising M&A to shareholders, and they are now proving their willingness to do real deals.

 

Architect Partners’ Observations

It should come as no surprise that payments is the word of the year for crypto in 2025. The craze was sparked by Stripe’s 1.1 billion dollar acquisition of Bridge, announced in late 2024. Since then, according to Architect Partners data, there have been over 30 acquisitions in crypto payments worth well over a billion dollars this year, and this wave of consolidation is still building rather than slowing. 

 

Exodus’ acquisition of Baanx is yet another example of this. Building these products and applying for the licensing takes a significant amount of time. Many are choosing to acquire and rapidly accelerate their time into the market, albeit at a very high cost due to these crypto payment companies being highly desired. 

 

Sources 

Exodus Press Release, PitchBook