SoFi office building for the SoFi and Payward partnership

SoFi Connects Its 24/7 Banking Network to Kraken and Brings SoFiUSD to the Exchange

By Isaac • September 3, 2026 11:25 am • Comments

SoFi and Kraken parent Payward are building a bridge between round-the-clock banking and round-the-clock crypto markets, with settlement, trading liquidity, and stablecoin distribution all included.

Payward will join the SoFi Exchange Network for real-time dollar settlement, SoFiUSD is headed to Kraken, and SoFi will use Kraken Prime as an additional source of liquidity for crypto trades made inside the SoFi app.

In its official announcement, SoFi said the partnership will let Kraken’s institutional clients clear and settle U.S. dollar transactions through the SoFi Exchange Network 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Crypto markets never close, while traditional bank settlement still operates around business hours and cutoff times. An exchange can keep its order books open all weekend, but moving dollars behind those trades is a different problem that SEN is designed to narrow.

Payward will also be able to use SoFi’s Big Business Banking capabilities. The companies said qualified custody could be added as the relationship expands, while payments, treasury, lending, and other digital-asset services are possible areas for future work.

The stablecoin side of the agreement gives SoFiUSD access to Kraken’s retail, professional, and institutional users. SoFi describes the token as redeemable one-for-one for U.S. dollars and issued within the safeguards of a regulated financial institution.

The listing gives SoFiUSD distribution, while lasting adoption will still depend on liquidity, reliable redemption, useful integrations, and repeated settlement demand. Kraken supplies a large venue where those factors can be tested in the open market.

Kraken says its Prime platform uses smart order routing to compare price and available depth across supported venues, directing each order toward the best available execution instead of relying on one order book; SoFi’s customer-facing app stays the same while Kraken Prime works behind it as another liquidity source, with qualified custody potentially following as the relationship develops. Kraken also places this transaction beside its institutional work with Deutsche Börse, Nasdaq, and Franklin Templeton, arguing that traditional financial products increasingly rely on digital-asset infrastructure that customers may never see, while the SoFi arrangement adds retail banking distribution and access to a nationally chartered bank’s always-on dollar settlement network.

For SoFi members, the goal is a better available price on trades they already make without requiring a separate Kraken account. Execution quality and dependable settlement are where repeated transaction value is created.

The Block describes the arrangement as a direct link between SoFi’s banking network and Kraken’s trading infrastructure: Payward joins SEN, SoFiUSD goes to Kraken, and Kraken Prime becomes an additional source of liquidity behind SoFi’s in-app crypto trades; institutional customers gain the ability to move dollars and manage liquidity beyond ordinary banking hours. The report also places the deal inside SoFi’s broader enterprise push, launched in April through Big Business Banking, while noting that the partners may extend their work into custody, payments, treasury, and lending after the initial settlement, listing, and execution pieces are operating.

SoFi says it serves 15.8 million members and its technology platform supports more than 134 million global accounts. Kraken contributes a large trading venue and institutional execution stack, giving each side infrastructure the other would take years to reproduce at the same scale.

Users may notice very little on the surface. Dollars can settle outside ordinary banking hours, orders can reach deeper liquidity, and a bank-issued stablecoin gains another market—the plumbing is the product.

If the connection works as intended, the line between a banking app and a crypto venue becomes less important than the quality of the settlement and execution underneath both. That is the larger signal in this partnership—and it is one the rest of the market will be watching.

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