Kraken will acquire tokenization infrastructure company Backed Finance for an undisclosed sum, the cryptocurrency exchange announced Tuesday.
The acquisition comes weeks after Kraken confidentially filed for its initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and after an $800 million capital raise that boosted its valuation to $20 billion.
The deal is set to accelerate global adoption of Backed’s xStocks tokenized equities. Since debuting this year, xStocks has surpassed $10 billion in combined exchange and on-chain trading volume, according to a blog post on the deal.
The acquisition also gives Backed access to capital and resources for faster scaling during a time of growing institutional demand for tokenized equities, Kraken said.
“Integrating Backed into Kraken strengthens the core architecture required for open and programmable capital markets,” Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in a prepared statement. “Unifying issuance, trading and settlement under one framework ensures the infrastructure for tokenized assets remains transparent, reliable and globally accessible. This is foundational work for the next era of market structure.”
This marks Kraken’s fifth deal in 2025. The firm purchased derivatives platform Small Exchange for $100 million in October from IG Group, laying the groundwork for Kraken to launch a fully U.S.-based derivatives product suite. Kraken bought multi-asset investment platform Breakout in September and no-code trading platform Capitalise.ai in August – disclosing financial terms for neither transaction – and it bought futures and foreign exchange trading platform NinjaTrader in March for $1.5 billion, its largest deal of the year.
Kraken isn’t the crypto world’s only active dealmaker this year. Coinbase said it would pay $2.9 billion to buy options exchange Deribit in May, and also announced deals with token management platform LiquiFi and on-chain ad platform Spindl. Ripple said it would buy prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion in April, Canadian stablecoin platform Rail for $200 million in August and corporate treasury manager GTreasury for $1 billion in October.
Robert Moore, Kraken’s vice president of business expansion, credited the uptick in deals to the regulatory about-face regarding crypto under the new Trump administration.
“A clear and positive regulatory environment in the U.S. gives companies the confidence to invest and grow with more certainty — and that includes M&A,” Moore said in an email to Banking Dive in October. “At Kraken, we’re being thoughtful and strategic about every deal we pursue, making sure it fits our vision for how financial infrastructure should evolve in the years ahead.”
Moore said he expected to see “a lot more” deals in the next six to nine months as companies “look to capitalize on favorable conditions while the window is open.”
