Magna

Magna is a token management platform covering vesting, unlocks, distributions, and custom claim portals. Founded in 2022 and backed by Y Combinator's Winter 2022 cohort, the company positioned itself early as infrastructure for crypto teams that need to handle complex token distribution workflows at scale — built as the purpose-built "Carta for Web3."

Token distribution is one of the most operationally intensive tasks in crypto. Vesting schedules span years, stakeholder lists run into the thousands, and a single misconfigured unlock can result in tokens sent to the wrong wallet or released on the wrong date. Magna was built to solve this problem — giving crypto projects a single platform to manage every stage of the token lifecycle, from initial vesting schedules through distributions and community airdrops.

How It Works

The platform operates on two axes. On one side are administrators — protocol teams, DAOs, and crypto funds — who use Magna to define unlock schedules, upload stakeholder lists, fund allocations, and trigger distributions. On the other are stakeholders — employees, investors, advisors, and community members — who log in to view their holdings, track pending unlocks, and claim available tokens through a white-labeled portal.

Three core concepts underpin the system: stakeholders (the recipients), allocations (the token quantities assigned to each recipient), and unlock schedules (the time-based or milestone-triggered rules governing when those tokens become available). Once configured, vesting runs automatically on audited smart contracts, with unused tokens returned to the admin wallet if an allocation is modified or cancelled.

Key Features

Flexible distribution modes: Magna supports both on-chain escrow contracts — where tokens are locked on-chain and released at schedule milestones — and off-chain schedule management, where tokens remain in the project treasury and are distributed at unlock time. Teams can choose based on their security posture and operational preferences.

Custom claim portals: The platform provides white-labeled claim interfaces that scale to one million recipients. Projects can embed these into their own sites or direct stakeholders to a hosted portal without the engineering overhead of building claim infrastructure from scratch.

Tax withholding and HR integrations: For projects treating token grants as compensation, Magna integrates with HR platforms including Rippling to handle tax withholding at the time of distribution. This matters for teams with international employees receiving token-denominated compensation subject to local tax obligations.

API-first architecture: Magna exposes both private admin and public portal APIs, enabling programmatic management of vesting contracts and distributions. Teams with complex or high-volume needs can automate allocation creation, schedule management, and distribution triggering through the API rather than relying solely on the dashboard.

Multi-chain support: The platform operates across Solana, Ethereum, Aptos, Arbitrum, Polygon, Base, and Avalanche.

Solana Roots and Ecosystem Traction

Magna launched with strong Solana orientation — Solana Ventures participated in its seed round — and several of its most notable early customers came from the Solana ecosystem.

The most prominent example is Tensor, the NFT marketplace on Solana. Tensor used Magna's REST API to programmatically create and manage on-chain vesting lockups for over 10,000 power users. The API integration allowed Tensor to handle allocation creation and schedule management at a scale and speed that would have been difficult to manage through a dashboard alone.

By 2025 Magna had grown to serve over 160 clients, reaching a peak total value locked of $60 billion that year — a figure reflecting the aggregate value of tokens held in active vesting contracts and managed schedules across the platform.

Team and Backing

Magna was co-founded by Bruno Faviero and Arun Kirubarajan, both with unusual backgrounds for crypto infrastructure.

Faviero previously founded Synapse Technology, an AI security automation company that was acquired by Palantir in 2020. After the acquisition he worked as a product manager on Palantir's AI Platform before starting Magna.

Kirubarajan came from quantitative finance — he was a quant trader at Millennium and an early employee at Vise — alongside academic work in NLP and machine learning at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also taught.

The seed round in September 2022 raised $15 million at a $70 million valuation. Tiger Global and Tusk Venture Partners led the round. Other participants included Shima Capital, Circle Ventures, Solana Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Avalanche Labs, Alchemy Ventures, and Galaxy Digital. Angel investors included Balaji Srinivasan, Messari founder Ryan Selkis, and DJ Steve Aoki.

Acquired by Payward (Kraken)

On February 18, 2026, Payward — the infrastructure entity behind the Kraken exchange — announced the acquisition of Magna. The deal marked a significant expansion of Kraken's ambitions beyond trading into the full token lifecycle.

Kraken's head of onchain, Calvin Leyon, described the acquisition as accelerating the exchange's evolution into supporting token management from issuance through scale. Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi framed it directly: "If we do not build reliable lifecycle infrastructure, markets consolidate around whoever controls distribution and access."

Magna operates as a standalone platform following the acquisition. Existing customer integrations are preserved, and the team is focused on onboarding, security hardening, and foundational integrations with Payward's broader product suite — which spans token fundraising, issuance workflows, and global-scale distribution.

For Magna's 160-plus customers, the near-term picture is continuity. The longer-term roadmap involves aligning Magna's capabilities with Payward's ambition to cover the complete token fundraising and distribution chain, giving Magna access to institutional liquidity infrastructure and the customer base of one of the largest exchanges by volume.

Where Magna Fits

Token vesting and distribution had, for years, been handled through a combination of custom smart contracts, spreadsheets, and manual transaction batches. The operational risk was significant — errors in cap table management, delayed unlocks, and underclaimed tokens are common in projects managing distributions at scale without dedicated tooling.

Magna addresses this as purpose-built infrastructure: audited contracts, a structured data model for stakeholders and allocations, API access for high-volume automation, and compliance integrations for teams treating tokens as compensation. Its traction across both Solana-native projects and multichain protocols suggests the core workflow problem it addresses — managing who gets tokens, when, and how — is consistent enough across ecosystems to support a horizontal platform rather than a chain-specific tool.

The Payward acquisition adds a new dimension to that story, embedding Magna within a broader vision of exchange-grade infrastructure for the full token lifecycle.