Kraken

Kraken is the trading name of Payward, Inc., a privately held company in San Francisco. Jesse Powell, Thanh Luu and Michael Gronager founded it in July 2011. Powell had been helping Mt. Gox recover from its first hack, and what he saw there shaped the new exchange. Kraken opened to the public in September 2013 with bitcoin, litecoin and euro pairs. Powell stepped down as CEO in 2023 and is now chairman. Since October 2024 Arjun Sethi and Dave Ripley have run the company as co-CEOs.

In the last two years Kraken has bought its way into markets well beyond crypto:

Kraken says it has more than 15 million clients. It reported $2.2 billion of adjusted revenue and $531 million of adjusted EBITDA for 2025. Those are the company's own adjusted figures. Payward doesn't file audited accounts publicly and won't until it lists. In the EU, Payward entities are registered as MiCA crypto-asset service providers, and regulated derivatives run under a Cypriot licence obtained in 2025. US clients in most states can also trade stocks and ETFs.

Kraken app or Kraken Pro? It's the same account with two front ends. The Kraken app is the simple buy/sell screen and charges a 1% commission plus spread. Kraken Pro is the order book, with maker/taker fees starting at 0.40%/0.80%. A business account is a separate onboarding track for companies. The trading fees are the same as for individuals.

It is a real business with a long record. In 15 years Kraken has not lost client funds to a hack of its own wallets, and it proves reserves in a way you can check yourself. An auditor snapshots every client balance into a Merkle tree, and you can confirm your own balance is included. Kraken then signs for the on-chain addresses that cover the total. The attestation dated 30 June 2026 showed:

Proof of reserves shows the coins exist. It doesn't show Payward's other liabilities, and a private company has no audited balance sheet for outsiders to read. That is the main gap compared with a listed exchange, and an IPO would close it.

The "Kraken hack" people search for was not a theft from clients. On 9 June 2024 a researcher reported a bug that let users credit their account with a deposit that never arrived. Kraken fixed it in 47 minutes, then found that the reporter and two colleagues, who turned out to work at the security firm CertiK, had used it to withdraw about $3 million from Kraken's own treasury. After a public dispute, CertiK returned the funds on 20 June, less a small amount lost to fees. No client balance was touched.

Its regulatory record is mostly US settlements over products and sanctions, not over lost money: $1.25 million to the CFTC (2021), $362,000 to OFAC for trades by users in Iran (2022), and $30 million to the SEC over US staking (2023). The SEC's larger 2023 lawsuit was dropped in March 2025. In Australia, Kraken's local operator paid an A$8 million penalty in 2024 over a margin product. See the incident list below for dates and sources.

The "Kraken wallet" is a separate self-custody app. Kraken can't recover its keys, so keep the recovery phrase offline and never give it to anyone who calls or messages you claiming to be Kraken support.

Kraken charges two different ways depending on the screen. The Kraken app takes a flat 1% commission plus spread on instant buys and sells. Kraken+ subscribers pay no commission on up to $10,000 a month in major assets, though spread and card fees still apply. Kraken Pro uses a published maker/taker ladder based on your 30-day volume:

Stablecoin and FX pairs start at 0.20%/0.20% and fall to nearly zero at high volume. Withdrawal fees depend on the asset and network. Kraken reserves the right to change them as costs change and lists the current fee for each asset on the withdrawal screen before you confirm.

In practice, buying $500 of bitcoin in the app costs about $5 in commission before spread. The same order as a maker on Kraken Pro costs $2. Above $10,000 a month, Pro's taker rate falls to 0.38%, below Coinbase Advanced's US entry maker rate. Custodial staking has its own commission, covered on the Kraken staking card.

Both are US-headquartered and US-supervised, and both let you trade crypto and US stocks from one account. They differ in cost structure and in what an outsider can verify:

On fees, Kraken Pro is cheaper for US traders at the entry tier. Coinbase is cheaper for EU and UK traders at entry level (0.25%/0.50%). On disclosure, Coinbase is ahead, because an audited 10-K covers liabilities and proof of reserves doesn't. Both exchanges had their SEC lawsuits dropped in 2025, Coinbase in February and Kraken in March.

Comparisons with other exchanges, including Binance, Gemini and Crypto.com, are scored side by side on our exchange ratings.

On 4 March 2026 the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City approved a master account for Kraken Financial, the Wyoming special-purpose depository institution (SPDI) Payward set up in 2020. Kraken had applied five and a half years earlier. It was the first time a crypto company was given direct access to the central bank's payment system. Custodia Bank, another Wyoming SPDI, has been suing the Fed for the same access since 2022.

• Tier 3. The strictest review tier, for institutions without federal deposit insurance or a federal supervisor.
• One-year initial term, so the Fed can review it before renewing.
• Payments, not lending. The account lets Kraken settle dollars directly on Fedwire. It does not include the discount window or interest on reserve balances, which is why it has been called a "skinny" account.

For clients, the benefit is plumbing. US dollar deposits and withdrawals can settle in central-bank money without going through a correspondent bank, which is the link that broke for many crypto firms in the 2023 bank failures. It doesn't mean dollars at Kraken are FDIC-insured, and it doesn't turn Kraken into a full bank. The American Bankers Association objected publicly that the Fed granted access before finishing its consultation on skinny accounts. Press reports in July 2026 said the account had not yet been switched on while technical and compliance work continued.

Kraken's listing has been on hold for most of 2026. Payward filed a confidential draft S-1 on 19 November 2025, the same month it raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation, and aimed to list in Q1 2026. It paused in March 2026 as crypto prices fell. Deutsche Börse paid $200 million for 1.5% in April, which implies about $13.3 billion. In May, Bloomberg reported the debut could slip to 2027, and Kraken cut about 150 jobs. Arjun Sethi has said Kraken is "80% ready". As of late September 2026 we found no public S-1.

Is there a Kraken token? Not from Kraken itself. The Ink Foundation, which supports the Kraken-incubated Ink layer-2, announced INK in June 2025 with a fixed supply of 1 billion. Kraken Pro started an Ink Points programme in April 2026. As of this check INK has no token generation event, no CoinGecko listing and no confirmed exchange listing. Any "INK" token trading now is not the official one.

US staking is back in a new form. After the 2023 SEC settlement closed its US staking programme, Kraken launched an on-chain staking product for clients in a number of US states in January 2025.