Kraken parent Payward buys Magic Labs wallet business, adding 60M users. Magic Labs rebrands to Newton Labs, focusing on policy validation. The deal closes in weeks.
Alpha Score of 61 reflects moderate overall profile with moderate momentum, strong value, moderate quality, moderate sentiment.
Payward, the parent company of Kraken, has agreed to acquire the wallet-as-a-service unit of Magic Labs. The deal, structured as an asset purchase, was announced July 27. Neither side disclosed the price.
Magic Labs built technology for more than 60 million self-custody wallets. The platform has drawn over 200,000 developers and processed more than $10 billion in stablecoin transfers. Payward plans to integrate the system into Payward Services, its enterprise product.
The acquisition lets Payward offer enterprise clients the ability to embed self-custody wallets directly into their own applications. It removes the need for those companies to sign up with a separate wallet provider. The underlying tech relies on a trusted execution environment for signing keys and a software development kit.
Current clients of Magic Labs will move to Payward's support infrastructure on August 1, Newton Labs CEO Sean Li said. He said the migration will not disrupt any existing implementations.
Magic Labs will rebrand as Newton Labs and operate as a separate business. Newton Labs will focus on Newton Protocol, which launched in beta on June 23. The protocol checks blockchain transactions against security policies and regulatory parameters before settlement. It generates attestations of each check.
The first product, VaultKit, applies those checks to decentralized finance vault operations. It runs on Ethereum and Base. Partners include RedStone, Credora, Webacy, and Chainalysis Hexagate.
The Magic Labs deal is one of several recent purchases by Payward. In May, the company bought derivatives platform Bitnomial for $550 million. In July, it acquired Hong Kong-based stablecoin processor Reap. Earlier deals include retail futures platform NinjaTrader, which cost $1.5 billion, and tokenized securities provider Backed Finance.
Magic Labs raised more than $80 million in venture funding before the sale. That included a $52 million round led by PayPal Ventures in May 2023.
Newton Labs plans to expand beyond vaults into stablecoins and tokenized assets. VaultKit is live on Ethereum and Base.
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