Kraken's acquisition of Reach has changed the growth logic of the exchange Reap is an unknown payment company in Hong Kong, founded in 2018, and gradually shifted towards stablecoin native payment infrastructure, making stablecoin settlement, company cards, cross-border payments, and enterprise financial management API based capabilities. This positioning is very similar to Bridge, which Stripe acquired in 2025. Interestingly, Daren Guo, the founder of Reach, is already the 90th employee of Stripe and has been involved in Stripe's global expansion and Asia Pacific business launch. This acquisition, based on the valuation of Kraken's parent company Payward at $20 billion, is also aimed at building momentum for Kraken's upcoming IPO. Over the past year, Payward has made 7 significant acquisitions (see attached image), including the acquisition of xStocks (Backed), a stock RWA issuer, which is a platform familiar to cryptocurrency users. These transactions are not isolated, and it can be clearly felt that Payward does not want its business to be just an exchange, but also covers trading, futures derivatives, stock RWA, stablecoin payments and other tracks. Based on stable payments, blockchain technology is the most likely direction to achieve mass adoption. In this direction, other exchanges/payment giants are also taking action: Coinbase acquired Utopia Labs in 2024 to accelerate the on chain payment route of Coinbase Wallet; Stripe acquired Bridge in 2025, marking the comprehensive entry of Web2 payment giant into the blockchain. Recently, we also collaborated with Meta to make cross-border payments of USDC to Meta's content creators through Bridge. Binance is promoting Binance Pay, which includes QR code payment and a transfer payment experience integrated with IM chat. Recently, there have been many initiatives in Vietnam as well; OKX promotes USDG and OKX Pay in the main app based on the X Layer chain, which are interrelated; It also connects to the GrabPay merchant network, where users can scan the GrabPay QR code with USDC/USDT, and the merchant will ultimately receive SGD fiat currency. The growth logic of the exchange has changed. Previously, exchanges competed in trading logic such as depth, currency, fees, and derivatives; Now that stablecoins have become on chain US dollars, exchanges are competing to see who can turn stablecoin balances into real payment flows.