Kraken parent Payward reports Q3 platform volume up 22% to $353B

Payward Inc, parent of crypto platform Kraken and futures broker NinjaTrader, released its Q3 2026 summary financial and operating figures. The release presented a fairly positive story for the quarter.

How Payward changed its reporting

Payward changed its reporting in three ways. It replaced Adjusted Revenue with Total Platform Margin (TPM). Adjusted Revenue subtracted the cost of crypto delivered to clients in a trade but left out staking rewards paid to them, while TPM subtracts both.

TPM now falls into three categories, based on how it is earned:

• Transaction based: earned when a client transacts, on the value of the transaction or for each contract traded.
• Asset based: earned over time on assets clients hold with the company.
• Access based: earned when clients and partners pay to use a product, data or service, separate from transacting or holding assets.

Two new operating metrics track growing parts of the business. Contracts Traded counts derivatives contracts traded or cleared on its platforms where a fee is charged per contract. Billable Accounts counts accounts that pay for access, such as trader evaluations, subscriptions, listings and index licenses.

Q3 2026 results

TPM reached $487 million, up 12% from $436 million in Q2 2026 and down 12% year over year. All three categories grew from Q2 2026:

• Transaction-based TPM rose 7% to $234 million.
• Asset-based TPM rose 26% to $128 million.
• Access-based TPM rose 7% to $125 million.

Asset- and access-based TPM made up 52% of the total, up from 50% in Q2 2026 and 46% in Q3 2025. Access-based TPM grew 59% from Q3 2025 and now makes up about a quarter of the total.

Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was $60 million, up from $23 million in Q2 2026. Its margin rose to 12% of TPM from 5%.

Total Platform Transaction Volume was $353 billion, up 22% from Q2 2026 and down 30% from Q3 2025. Kraken grew while industry spot volume fell 7% from Q2 2026, and its share of industry spot volume rose to 6.5% in September 2026 from 3.3% in September 2025.

Contracts Traded reached 66 million, up 10% from Q2 2026 and 84% from Q3 2025. Payward said more clients are trading futures and other derivatives, which diversifies transaction-based TPM beyond fees tied to notional volume.

Assets on Platform (AOP) averaged $43 billion, up 4% from Q2 2026 and down 21% from Q3 2025. Clients added assets in each of the last 12 months, and AOP at Constant Prices rose 29% from Q3 2025 to $71 billion.

Billable Accounts reached 1.5 million, up 9% from Q2 2026 and 74% from Q3 2025. These accounts pay to use products, which Payward said gives it a steady, growing source of earnings alongside trading and client assets.

Funded Accounts reached 7.1 million, up 7% from Q2 2026 and 37% from Q3 2025. Accounts with balances have grown about 35% per year since the end of 2023, and Payward said that growth shows its ability to keep attracting new clients through market cycles.

AI agents and Payward's ledger

Payward introduced four pillars last quarter: Trading, Banking, Asset Management and Payward Services. This quarter it made artificial intelligence (AI) the fifth. The company said each financial product is a ledger with rules and a view onto it, so the four pillars are four views of one ledger. A single balance can trade, earn, secure a loan and be spent, and each new product costs less to launch and makes the others more useful. Partners bring their own clients onto the same ledger.

Agents are the next client of that ledger, after consumers, professional traders, institutions and businesses. They need APIs, markets that never close, instant settlement, programmable collateral and sub-accounts, which the platform already provides. The company said models are already good at deciding what to do with money, and the hard part is acting on it. An agent stalls when capital sits in the wrong asset, on the wrong platform or cannot be posted as collateral. On Payward it has one balance and one place to act.

Every Payward app will get an agent harness, the layer where a client directs an agent across everything they hold with the company. One team builds the shared platform, and each product team builds its app's harness on it. The company expects the first to be available early next year.

Payward said it learns a great deal from the open-source community and will keep supporting it. It builds on that work with proprietary data on trading, balances, payments, identity and risk for the same client in one place, which it believes few in the industry can match. The company plans to train its own models on that data. Where a language model predicts the next word, Payward's models will predict the next transaction. Because it runs the execution, it will find out quickly whether the outcome was good.

People are about to hand money to software that decides what to do with it, the company wrote. Models work in probabilities, but the ledger, margin, settlement and custody underneath them have to be exact. Every action an agent proposes goes through a risk engine, which decides in code within limits the client sets.