Kraken's parent joins SoFi's 24/7 dollar network. The last SEN closed in 2023

Payward, which owns Kraken, is joining the SoFi Exchange Network and listing SoFiUSD on the exchange. SoFi will route its own digital asset orders through Kraken Prime. The point of the deal is settlement that runs when banks are shut: SEN moves dollars around the clock, and crypto markets have never observed banking hours.

What each side gets

SoFi brings a bank charter, 15.8 million members, and a technology arm that services more than 134 million accounts. Payward brings the exchange, the institutional brokerage and the order flow. SoFiUSD, the dollar stablecoin SoFi Bank issued this year against cash and short-term Treasurys, becomes tradable on Kraken, and Payward gets business banking inside SoFi.

“The financial system should not shut down when markets stay open.”

— Anthony Noto, CEO, SoFi, SoFi, 3 September 2026

“Money and markets are converging into a new financial paradigm, and the infrastructure underneath has to catch up.”

— David Ripley, Co-CEO, Payward, SoFi, 3 September 2026

Quote source: SoFi, 3 September 2026

The acronym has a history

Crypto has had a 24/7 dollar settlement network before, and it used the same three letters. Silvergate ran the Silvergate Exchange Network, which moved $117 billion in the year to January 2023 and counted Kraken among its users. Silvergate suspended it on March 3, 2023 and wound down the bank days later. Signature Bank's Signet, the only comparable rail, disappeared the same month when regulators closed the bank.

The industry spent the following two years without an instant dollar rail, settling through wires that stop on Friday evening.

For a trader the change is narrower than the announcement sounds. Round-the-clock settlement applies to institutional clients inside these two networks, so a weekend deposit from an outside bank still waits for that bank to open. What moves faster is the money between the exchange, its market makers and its prime clients, which is where a weekend price gap is usually paid for.

The difference this time

The 2023 networks moved dollars as entries on a single bank's internal ledger, so the rail died with the bank. SoFi is adding a stablecoin alongside the network, which puts a transferable claim on the customer's side rather than a balance inside one institution. Whether that survives an issuer in trouble depends on the reserves and the redemption terms, not on the settlement speed.

The concentration question stays either way. A bank that becomes the clearing point for a large exchange takes on that exchange's risk profile, and the last two institutions to try it were closed by their regulators.

The wider push

Payward has been assembling traditional finance connections at pace: it signed with the London Stock Exchange's parent group in the same week to tokenize UK stocks. Banks are moving the other way, with 21 of them, Goldman Sachs and UBS included, working on a joint dollar stablecoin. Neither side has said what the settlement fees look like, which is the number that decides how much volume moves.

Neither company gave a launch date. The date to watch is the first Sunday when a large redemption has to clear at three in the morning, because that is the case the old networks were built for and the case that broke their banks.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.