Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, will not pursue an initial public offering before the second quarter of 2027, according to a CoinDesk report citing two people familiar with the matter. A company representative declined to comment on the record.
The delay is Payward's second in six months. The company filed confidentially for an IPO with the SEC in November 2025, then paused those plans in March, citing difficult market conditions. According to CoinDesk, the latest postponement reflects weak crypto prices and trading volumes industrywide, along with poor aftermarket performance among recently listed digital-asset companies that has cooled investor appetite for new listings.
Bitcoin itself is trading around $77,000, down close to 39% from the all-time high of roughly $126,000 it reached in October. The stocks of this year's crypto-linked listings have fared little better. BitGo, which listed on the NYSE in January at $18 a share, trades around $6.86. Bullish, which more than doubled on its debut last August and reached a high near $75, has fallen back to about $33, close to its $37 IPO price. Circle remains well above its $31 IPO price at around $89, though it too has retreated sharply from its own high. Coinbase, the sector's longest-standing public pure-play exchange, has fared similarly: its shares trade around $175, down more than 56% from a 52-week high of $402. Grayscale, Consensys, and Ledger have each pushed back their own IPO plans over the same stretch.
Payward was last valued at around $20 billion. The company reported $508 million in adjusted revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year over year, alongside 6.6 million funded accounts and $40 billion in platform assets.
Whichever quarter Payward eventually lists in, it will be doing so with a fuller run of newly public crypto companies' stock charts for investors to judge it against.
