Magic Labs said on July 27, 2026 it has sold its embedded wallet business to Payward, Inc. and relaunched as Newton Labs, shifting its full focus to an authorization layer that vets onchain transactions before they settle.
Key Takeaways
- Magic Labs has sold its embedded wallet business to Payward, Inc. in an asset sale and now operates as Newton Labs.
- Magic Labs has created more than 60 million wallets and supports over 200,000 developers since 2018.
- Wallet customers will move to Payward Services after the close, expected in the coming weeks, with no action required.
- Newton Protocol enforces compliance, security, and risk rules on transactions ahead of settlement. It entered mainnet beta in June 2026.
- VaultKit, Newton Labs’ first product, gives institutional vaults a shared, verifiable standard for enforcing rules inside every transaction.
What Happened?
Magic Labs announced the deal in a press release issued through EIN Presswire. The transaction is an asset sale, and Magic Labs, Inc. and Payward remain separate, independent companies. The announcement did not disclose a sale price.
The company pioneered the embedded wallet category and grew it into infrastructure used across consumer and institutional applications, . That business now moves to Payward, while the remaining company takes the Newton Labs name and puts its full weight behind Newton Protocol.
Sean Li, CEO of Newton Labs said:
Payward Brings Wallets In-House
Payward, Inc. describes itself as a unified financial infrastructure platform. It provides the layer behind Kraken and a set of purpose-built products:
- NinjaTrader
- Breakout
- xStocks
- Bitnomial
- CF Benchmarks
Mark Greenberg, Payward’s Chief Commercial Officer, said:
The companies say products and integrations continue to operate without interruption and that no customer action is required. Every customer will receive direct communication about the transition, and vendors and counterparties whose agreements are affected will be notified directly. Wallet customers and developers should still read that notice when it arrives, confirm any migration message actually names Payward Services, and check whether their own agreements are on the affected list. Caution with unexpected emails asking for keys or credentials helps reduce risk during ownership changes.
Today we announced two decisions: 1) we’ve sold our wallet business to Payward, the company behind Kraken. And 2) Magic Labs is becoming Newton Labs.
— Sean Li (@seanli) July 27, 2026
Onboarding the world was part one of our mission. Securing the capital that follows is part two.
Here’s a video on why. 👇 https://t.co/UhU7GLErKC pic.twitter.com/4ezZfcoVkX
What Newton Labs Builds Next?
Newton Labs is the core developer of Newton Protocol, which lets any asset or application enforce compliance, security, and risk policies on a transaction before settlement. The company says the protocol turns rules that today live in operational processes and off-chain systems into automatic execution anyone can verify, a shift from the manual controls in blockchain security.
VaultKit is the first product built on the protocol. It is a composable set of policies that institutional-grade vaults use to enforce compliance, security, identity, and risk logic inside every transaction, giving capital allocators a standard they can verify rather than trust. Newton Labs plans to extend the same layer to tokenized real-world assets, stablecoins, and agentic commerce and finance, growth areas. The company is backed by PayPal Ventures, Cherubic, DCG, CoinFund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tiger Global, and Placeholder.
The announcement leaves some questions open. It does not say what Payward paid, when exactly the deal closes beyond the coming weeks, or how many of the developer accounts and wallets transfer to Payward Services.
CoinLaw’s Takeaway
The sale splits two very different businesses. Wallet infrastructure rewards scale and distribution, which Payward already has through Kraken and its product family. Authorization is a compliance problem, and Newton Labs is betting that institutions moving large sums onchain will pay for rules enforced in code that anyone can check. The bet only pays off if VaultKit convinces capital allocators that verifiable policies beat their current back office controls.
What’s next: the close is expected in the coming weeks, and every wallet customer will get direct communication after that. Customers should wait for the official notice before changing anything. Developers should confirm which entity now services their integration. Watch for Newton Protocol to move beyond mainnet beta, since adoption by vaults, stablecoin issuers, and asset platforms will show whether the authorization pitch lands.
