The Deal In Brief
Payward is acquiring Magic’s non-custodial wallet infrastructure platform (not the entire company) in an asset purchase agreement. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The wallet infrastructure itself has powered over 60 million wallets, $10 billion+ in stablecoin volume, and over 200,000 developers since Magic launched in 2018. The deal is expected to close within weeks. Users of Magic wallets will begin migrating to Payward starting August 1 and will experience no interruptions to their current wallet integrations, while Magic Labs will be renamed to Newton Labs and will work on non-wallet products.
The Logic: Wallets As The Missing Layer
Payward already runs Payward Services, a B2B platform offering banks, fintechs, and onchain applications bundled trading, custody, tokenized-asset infrastructure, derivatives, and fiat on/off ramps. Magic fills out that stack with wallet infrastructure: software that allows a Payward partner to open self-custodial accounts without the hassle of integrating a third-party wallet provider. That wallet layer is provided by Magic’s signing infrastructure that runs on TEEs, an embedding layer, and an SDK that enables businesses to issue non-custodial wallets at scale.
Payward’s chief commercial officer Mark Greenberg said that with this deal, wallets will sit in the same stack alongside exchange and custody, so partners will no longer need to cobble together various providers. He linked the development to tokenized assets and stablecoins maturing, at which point wallet infrastructure becomes table stakes.
Magic Labs Is Narrowing, Not Disappearing
Magic has been working on Newton Protocol for the past two years. It verifies if an onchain transaction adheres to preconfigured security, identity, risk, and compliance policies before settlement is processed. The protocol went into mainnet beta on June 23, and their first product out of it, VaultKit, allows operators of DeFi vaults to apply policy controls to management transactions on Ethereum and Base. VaultKit is supported by data partners including RedStone, Credora, Webacy, and Chainalysis Hexagate.
By selling off the wallet business, the component of Magic that reaches 60 million end users who’ve come to recognize the brand, Magic can now double down on that authorization layer. CEO Sean Li explained that the sale shifts wallets over to a team that can scale them while Newton focuses on securing onchain capital movements. Newton Labs has raised more than $80 million to date, including a $52 million Series B led by PayPal Ventures. Ultimately, it envisions its policy engine extending to cover stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and algorithmic financial agents – all of which are on the roadmap, but have not been shipped yet.
Part of A Pattern, Not a One-Off
This is at least the fourth notable acquisition in roughly a year as Payward builds out a broader financial platform:
| Acquisition | Segment added |
|---|---|
| NinjaTrader ($1.5B, 2025) | Retail futures trading |
| Backed Finance (undisclosed) | Tokenized securities |
| Bitnomial (up to $550M, closed May 2026) | Regulated derivatives |
| Reap (~$600M, closed July 2026) | Stablecoin payments, card issuance |
| Magic Labs wallets (undisclosed, announced July 2026) | Embedded non-custodial wallets |
The deal covers all the bases: exchanges, derivatives, tokenized assets, payments, custody and now wallets. Any feature that plugs into the same backend that powers Kraken, xStocks, Breakout and CF Benchmarks. According to Payward, the four share a liquidity pool, risk engine and compliance systems.
What it Means for Existing Users
Existing users of Magic’s systems will also be promised no interruptions: no need to take any action at all; Magic will simply replace Payward in the background. That means for Payward’s customers who use self-custody wallets, they’ll simply be another option baked into an integration they’re already using to trade or custody assets.
Whether or not that process will be as seamless as billed will depend on details to be determined. Those include how different wallet compatibility will be ensured across networks, how long the tech integration takes, as well as how the legal close unfolds over the next few weeks. Both are privately held companies, and there’s no public token to keep an eye on, so there won’t be a market price to track. The true test will be whether Magic’s pool of 200,000 developers sticks around for the product with a different name on its wallet infrastructure.
