Kraken

Kraken is one of the oldest names in crypto that never blew up, and that longevity is the whole pitch. Founded in 2011 in San Francisco by Jesse Powell, Thanh Luu, and Michael Gronager, it grew into a global exchange trusted by 13+ million people, with $2T+ in total transaction volume and the industry's first Proof of Reserves audit to back up its transparency claims.

The company you actually deal with is Payward, Inc., and the ambition has outgrown the trading app. Payward now owns NinjaTrader, Bitnomial, xStocks, CF Benchmarks, and more, and it is stitching them into one regulated stack that spans crypto, stocks, futures, and payments. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi, who joined from the board in late 2024, has been blunt about the goal: build the Nasdaq of crypto and take it public.

Kraken lets you buy, sell, and trade crypto with as little as $10, then keeps going: spot, margin, US perpetual futures, staking, custody, a debit card, and now US stocks and ETFs, all from a single account. The bet is that a serious trader should not have to leave the platform as they level up from a first Bitcoin buy to leveraged perps.

What separates it from a plain exchange is how much of the stack Payward owns outright. For US perpetual futures it points to owning Bitnomial (the exchange and clearinghouse) and NinjaTrader (the broker), so it can offer regulated perps onshore without routing customer money through third parties. Three licenses, one company, is the line they use.

Two problems sit at the center of Kraken's product. The first is trust: crypto is full of exchanges that lost customer funds, so Kraken leans hard on Proof of Reserves, regulated entities, and a clean security record as its answer to the question every user quietly asks. The second is access. Until recently, trading perpetual futures in the US meant going offshore through a VPN, trusting platforms outside US regulation with no guarantee your funds were safe.

Kraken's fix is to bring those markets onshore under its own licenses and to collapse the usual mess of separate accounts. Spot, margin, and futures share one wallet, one margin pool, and one login, so a trader can move up in complexity without switching platforms.

Kraken deliberately serves both ends of the market at once. On one side are retail newcomers who want to buy their first crypto in minutes and casual investors who like the app's simplicity. On the other are professional traders who want deep liquidity, 10x spot margin, and perps, plus institutions, family offices, and hedge funds routed through Kraken Institutional, Prime, and Custody.

The VIP and institutions desks are pitched at ultra-high-net-worth individuals and global firms, while affiliates and creators get their own program. It is a wide funnel by design, and the risk is the classic one: a product built for everyone has to keep the beginner from feeling lost and the pro from feeling underserved.

Kraken's lineup started as an exchange and kept expanding outward into custody, futures, a card, and equities. The through-line is that each new product reuses the same account, wallet, and regulatory footprint, so the suite feels like one platform rather than a bundle of apps.

The more interesting recent moves are at the edges: onshore US perpetual futures built on owned infrastructure, a Kraken+ subscription that zeroes out trading fees, and equities trading through a FINRA-registered broker-dealer. Crypto is still the core, but the roadmap clearly points at a full-stack brokerage.

Kraken makes most of its money the way exchanges always have: fees on trades, spreads, and financing. Spot margin charges 0.01% to 0.05% to open a position plus a rollover fee every four hours, futures run a maker-taker model that drops as your volume grows, and margin borrow costs add up on leveraged positions.

The newer wrinkle is Kraken+, a $4.99 per month subscription that waives trading fees on up to $10k of monthly volume and boosts stablecoin rewards. It is a bet that heavy users will happily pay a flat fee to escape per-trade costs, and it gives Kraken a recurring revenue line that does not depend on market volatility.

Kraken's most obvious rival is Coinbase, the larger, already-public US exchange, and the comparison is the frame for its whole IPO story. Against offshore venues like Binance and Bybit, Kraken's pitch is the opposite of theirs: regulated, onshore, and transparent rather than fast and jurisdiction-shopping.

The edge it keeps returning to is ownership of the stack. By owning the exchange, clearinghouse, and broker for US perps, Kraken can offer regulated products competitors have to source from third parties, and its 14-year track record with no major breach is a moat that money cannot buy quickly.

Kraken's credibility case is built on a few hard numbers it repeats everywhere. It has run since 2011, serves 13+ million clients, has cleared $2T+ in total transaction volume, and ran the industry's first Proof of Reserves audit.

Third parties back the security claim more than the marketing does: Kraken scores 90 out of 100 on the CER exchange security review and has avoided the catastrophic hacks that sank other venues. Forbes voted it a best crypto platform, and the clean-breach record over 14 years is the single stat that does the most work.

The reviews land in a consistent spot: people trust Kraken and like using it, but they get frustrated when something goes wrong. The praise clusters around a clean app and UI, real transparency and Proof of Reserves, and a security reputation that ranks near the top of the industry.

The complaints are just as recurring. Slow customer support is the loudest one, with users describing being locked out for hours or days, and there are gripes about fees and occasional app lag during trades. Availability is spotty too: several US states restrict staking, and a couple bar the platform entirely. Strong product, shaky service, is the fair summary.

Kraken's money story in 2025 and 2026 is really an IPO story with detours. In November 2024 it raised $800M across two tranches from backers including Jane Street, DRW Venture Capital, and Tribe Capital, and Citadel Securities later added a $200M strategic investment at a $20 billion valuation.

The path to public has been bumpy. Parent Payward confidentially filed an S-1 in November 2025, then froze the plan in March 2026 on tough market conditions, and by May was raising fresh capital while co-CEO Arjun Sethi called the company 80% ready to list. Valuation signals are mixed: a Deutsche Borse secondary implied roughly $13.3B, below the $20B other rounds carried. Along the way Payward bought Reap for $600M and Bitnomial for $550M to fill out the stack before going public.

Kraken's next chapter hinges on execution across a lot of new surfaces at once: onshore US perps, equities, payments, and a public listing, all while defending the trust record that is its best asset. The full-stack, own-the-licenses strategy is a real differentiator if it holds together.

The watch items are just as clear. The IPO timing is at the mercy of the market, the valuation has wobbled between $13B and $20B, and the customer-support complaints are the kind of thing that gets louder as a company scales into stocks and banking. If Kraken fixes service while it ships regulated products competitors cannot, the Nasdaq-of-crypto pitch has legs.

Kraken is not remote-friendly, it is remote-first, and it makes the distinction a point of pride. The company hires globally with no headquarters attendance required, pays a competitive salary regardless of location, and lets employees take part of that pay in crypto. Its self-described culture prizes independent thinking, extreme ownership, radical transparency, and a written, async way of working.

The mission line is consistent across every careers page: accelerate the global adoption of crypto so everyone can reach financial freedom and inclusion. Hiring is a structured virtual gauntlet, from CV screen to a practical case study, and candidates are expected to dogfood the products before they show up. Right now it is hiring across engineering, data, AI, design, operations, compliance, and marketing, spread across the UK, US, Ireland, Poland, Canada, Brazil, and APAC.

Disclosed US bands put engineering roughly between $96k and $254k and product and design around $96k to $192k, with operations and senior individual roles reaching into the high $200ks. Kraken says it pays a competitive salary regardless of location, which flattens the usual geography discount for a globally remote team.

The part worth watching is the rest of the package. Most roles come with equity grants, and Kraken offers the unusual option of being paid in crypto, so the total comp is base plus equity plus an optional crypto tilt rather than salary alone.

The registered entity behind everything is Payward, Inc., operating through a group of local subsidiaries so the entity you contract with depends on your product and jurisdiction. US equities run through Kraken Securities LLC (FINRA/SIPC), US perpetual futures through NinjaTrader Clearing d/b/a Kraken Derivatives US (a CFTC-registered FCM), and MiFID II instruments in Europe through Payward Europe Digital Solutions.

On data, Kraken states plainly that it does not sell personal data, and its privacy program spans the usual heavy KYC and AML collection you would expect from a regulated exchange. The security posture leans on MPC and HSM-based key storage for custody, with assets segregated and bankruptcy-remote for institutional clients.

Most of the recent coverage tracks two threads: whether and when Kraken goes public, and how aggressively Payward is buying up the pieces around its exchange. The IPO froze in March 2026, then the funding chatter resumed at a $20 billion valuation by May, keeping the listing question open.

Alongside that, the acquisitions of Reap and Bitnomial signaled that Kraken wants to own payments and derivatives infrastructure outright rather than rent it.