Payward, the company behind Kraken, has signed a definitive agreement to buy the wallet-as-a-service business of Magic Labs, one of crypto’s earliest and largest embedded-wallet providers. The deal, announced July 27, folds infrastructure that has powered more than 60 million non-custodial wallets into Payward Services, the company’s business-to-business platform. Financial terms were not disclosed, and Cointelegraph reports the companies expect the transaction to close in the coming weeks, subject to customary closing conditions.
What Payward is actually buying
Magic Labs is not a household name for retail traders, but for developers it has been a fixture since 2018. The company pioneered wallet-as-a-service: instead of asking users to install MetaMask or another third-party wallet, an app embeds Magic’s SDK and issues non-custodial wallets invisibly, behind a familiar login. By the company’s own count, that stack has created more than 60 million wallets for over 200,000 developers and moved more than $10 billion in stablecoin transactions.
Technically, the acquired business combines three pieces into one stack: a TEE-based signing solution (trusted execution environments keep keys out of reach of both the app and Magic itself), an embedded integration layer, and a developer SDK. That is the machinery Payward now gets to bring in-house.
Payward Services inches toward one-stop infrastructure
The strategic logic is consolidation. Payward Services already gives business partners a single integration for crypto trading, custody, tokenized assets, fiat on- and off-ramps, and derivatives. Embedded wallets were the missing layer — until now, a fintech building an onchain product on Payward rails still needed a separate vendor if it wanted self-custodied wallets inside its own app.
“Embedded wallets are becoming foundational infrastructure for every onchain product. Magic Labs’ technology lets us bring that layer in-house and offer partners a complete, integrated stack — exchange, custody, and now wallets — without stitching together multiple providers,” said Mark Greenberg, Payward’s Chief Commercial Officer, in the announcement.
That pitch lands in a specific moment. Payward has spent 2026 assembling a family of products under one architecture — Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Bitnomial, and CF Benchmarks all run on what the company describes as one global liquidity pool, one risk and margin engine, and one compliance framework. Days before this deal, Payward announced a partnership with GTN to expand global access to its xStocks tokenized equities. Adding wallet issuance means an enterprise client can now theoretically launch a full onchain financial product — trading, custody, settlement, and the wallet itself — without ever leaving Payward’s stack.
Magic Labs becomes Newton Labs
The sale is equally a story about the seller. Magic Labs is shedding the business it was founded on to concentrate on Newton, which it calls the authorization layer for onchain finance — a protocol that lets institutions, asset issuers, and decentralized protocols enforce compliance, identity, security, and risk policies before a transaction settles, with results verifiable onchain.
“This transition allows us to put our full energy behind Newton, the authorization layer for onchain finance, while the wallet business moves to a team committed to serving our customers,” said Sean Li, CEO of the renamed Newton Labs.
The company, backed by PayPal Ventures, Cherubic, DCG, CoinFund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tiger Global, and Placeholder, is effectively betting that the next scarce layer in crypto is not wallet creation — now commoditized enough to sell — but transaction authorization and policy enforcement for institutional capital.
The quiet consolidation of wallet infrastructure
For developers currently building on Magic’s SDK, the near-term question is continuity: Payward says the technology will be integrated into the Payward Services product suite once the deal closes, giving enterprise partners “a more complete onchain offering under a single provider.” For the broader market, the signal is starker. Embedded wallets began as a startup category with dozens of independent providers; one of its pioneers just concluded the business is worth more inside an exchange conglomerate than standing alone. As stablecoin payments and tokenized assets pull traditional businesses onchain, the wallet layer is being absorbed into the same infrastructure giants that already run trading and custody — and the standalone wallet-infrastructure startup is starting to look like a transitional species.
