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The race to own enterprise crypto infrastructure is intensifying, and Kraken’s parent company just made a significant move to get ahead of it. Payward announced on Monday that it has agreed to acquire the wallet-as-a-service business of Magic Labs, folding a platform that has powered more than 60 million non-custodial wallets into its growing suite of business-to-business services. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal is expected to close within weeks, subject to standard closing conditions.
The acquisition is less about adding a product and more about closing a gap. Payward already operates Payward Services, a B2B platform covering crypto trading, custody, tokenized assets, and fiat on- and off-ramps. What it lacked was a native embedded wallet layer, meaning business clients had to source that capability from third-party providers. Magic Labs fills that gap directly.
Why Embedded Wallets Are the Infrastructure Layer Everyone Wants
To understand why this deal matters, it helps to understand what wallet-as-a-service actually does. Traditional crypto wallets require users to manage their own private keys, which is a significant friction point for mainstream adoption. Wallet-as-a-service platforms like Magic Labs allow developers to embed self-custodied wallets directly into their own applications, abstracting away the complexity without surrendering user control over assets.
The distinction between custodial and non-custodial is important here. A custodial wallet means a third party holds the private keys on behalf of the user, which introduces counterparty risk. A non-custodial wallet keeps key control with the user, which is the model regulators and security-conscious institutions increasingly prefer. Magic Labs built its business on the non-custodial model, and that track record carries weight. Its infrastructure has supported over 200,000 developers and facilitated more than $10 billion in stablecoin transactions.
For Payward, integrating this technology into Payward Services means enterprise clients can now access trading infrastructure, custody, tokenization, fiat rails, and embedded wallets through a single integration point. That kind of consolidation is exactly what institutional and fintech clients are looking for as they build onchain financial products at scale.
A Calculated Retreat for Magic Labs
The deal is also a strategic pivot for Magic Labs itself. Rather than continuing to compete across the full wallet stack, the company is narrowing its focus to Newton, a platform designed to help users and applications authorize and verify onchain transactions without relying on centralized intermediaries. That is a more specialized bet on decentralized authentication infrastructure, and shedding the wallet business to Payward gives Magic Labs the runway to pursue it without splitting its attention.
This kind of carve-out, where a startup sells one business unit to fund a more focused next chapter, is increasingly common in the maturing crypto sector. It signals that the wallet-as-a-service space has reached a point where scale and distribution matter more than independence, making acquisition by a larger platform a logical outcome for players who built early but lack the enterprise sales reach to compete at the next level.
What This Means for Businesses Building on Blockchain
For fintech companies and developers in Malaysia and Singapore looking to build onchain products, the consolidation underway at Payward is worth watching. Both markets have seen growing regulatory clarity around digital assets. Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore has been active in licensing digital payment token service providers, while Malaysia’s Securities Commission oversees digital asset exchanges under its own framework. As the regulatory environment matures, businesses in both jurisdictions are increasingly evaluating which infrastructure partners can offer compliance-ready, enterprise-grade tooling.
A combined Payward offering that bundles custody, trading, tokenization, fiat connectivity, and embedded wallets under one roof reduces the integration burden significantly. For a regional fintech building a stablecoin payment product or a tokenized asset platform, that kind of one-stop infrastructure is genuinely attractive, particularly when the underlying wallet technology has already processed $10 billion in stablecoin volume and proven itself at scale.
The broader trend this acquisition reflects is the gradual institutionalization of crypto infrastructure. The early era of fragmented, mix-and-match blockchain tooling is giving way to consolidated platforms that can serve enterprise clients with the reliability, compliance support, and breadth of services they expect from traditional financial infrastructure providers. Payward is positioning itself as one of those platforms, and the Magic Labs deal is a concrete step in that direction. Whether it can execute on that ambition across a global client base will determine how meaningful this acquisition ultimately proves to be.
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