I am very proud of what we’ve accomplished in 2018. Kraken is the world’s largest exchange, with a user base of over 10 million and volumes in excess of $1 billion every day. This is a huge achievement for a company that was born just three years ago.
We were also the first crypto exchange to list Ethereum Classic, when it was trading at $1.21 per token. And we were the first exchange in the world to make our own crypto tokens available to our customers, which we did in March by issuing the Kraken Coin (KRK).
These achievements would not have been possible without our customers, who are truly exceptional. Thank you so much for being part of our community and making Kraken one of the best places to trade cryptocurrency. We look forward to an even more exciting 2019!
Jesse Powell reveals the huge increase in volume on Kraken’s platform during 2018, and discusses how the company has planned and executed to remain competitive in a fast-moving market.
Kraken is one of the largest exchanges, with over $100 billion traded in 2018. We’re also the oldest exchange, founded way back in 2011.
Our mission is to provide a safe and user-friendly trading experience that anyone can use. We strive to be the exchange everyone uses to trade crypto and fiat currencies.
We’re using machine learning to help make our users’ experience better and more effective every day. We have an AI team that works with our engineers on improving Kraken’s performance and stability. We are constantly testing out new features that are being developed by our engineers as well as some of our community developers, such as new fee schedules, improved trading screens, etc.
We’re in an exciting time for Bitcoin. It’s a good time to be a cryptocurrency fan, and especially a fan of Kraken.
As 2018 draws to a close, it is worth looking back at all that Kraken has accomplished over the year. This post will focus on key highlights from the past year.
In the end of last year, we had seen more than our fair share of volatility. I would like to say that the entire year was difficult, but I think that’s not quite right.
We had seen huge amounts of money moving around, with movements sometimes as high as hundreds of millions of dollars per day. But it seemed to me like there was a lot more stability than people expected. I think we’ve shown that we can handle financial markets as well as anyone else. That being said, there were some very interesting things happening in the world at large too!
After Bitcoin’s price skyrocketed in late 2017 and early 2018, many people started to question whether this was sustainable or not. I thought that it was entirely reasonable: if you are building systems out of thin air and giving them value by giving them scarcity, then that’s how things need to look for the system to work properly.
It took about six months for this question to gain
I thought about the biggest, highest-volume exchange in the world for a long time. I wanted to have control over the exchange. It had to be a fully transparent process, and I didn’t want to work with any of the existing exchanges. So I said yes to this project, which was taking place at the time.
There’s no way anyone can look at the numbers that Kraken announces every day and say they are not correct. I’m working with mathematicians and some of them are very good at what they do, but there are still things we don’t understand. There is a lot going on under the hood, and it’s hard to prove everything is correct because we’re changing things so often. We have our own bank; we have our own blockchain; we’re adding new currencies all the time.
I think bitcoin is going to become more valuable than gold in the next 10 years.
Kraken is a popular cryptocurrency exchange that offers its services in the US, Europe, and Japan. Jesse Powell, who founded Kraken in 2011, was recently named one of the top ten “most influential people in blockchain” by Forbes. Kraken is a publicly traded company, and Powell has made many public remarks on the future of cryptocurrencies.
The best way to understand Kraken is as a bitcoin exchange. It’s the biggest and most liquid, but it also has some unusual features that may have helped it beat out its competitors.
First, there’s the way it handles trading. Most exchanges offer only one or two trading pairs, and those are unchanging over time. (You can buy Bitcoin and sell it for dollars or euros.) Kraken, on the other hand, offers hundreds of different pairs on which you can trade bitcoins for various other cryptocurrencies or fiat currencies. That means you don’t have to choose between setting up a bitcoin wallet and buying bitcoins from Kraken; you can do both at once with different types of accounts.
More important, however, is how Kraken handles deposits and withdrawals. Most exchanges require users to deposit fiat currency before they can trade on their platform—the equivalent of using a credit card. They also charge high fees for these transactions; Coinbase, for example, takes 1 percent of all bitcoin deposits (on top of whatever fees you’d pay your bank if you were buying bitcoins).
Kraken doesn’t collect any fees until customers actually make a trade on their platform. What they want is not money up front but trading volume in the future. So they allow people to deposit bitcoins into their
The most recent security breach of the world’s biggest exchange, an enormous failure which cost members of the public millions of dollars and wiped out trading on billions of dollars in value, was less than a fortnight ago. The company behind it all announced this week that it had hired auditors to examine its systems and procedures, and promised to release a full report “forthwith”.
This is a classic example of the problem with crypto: there are no guarantees. If a person or a company runs an operation like Kraken, they are responsible for everything that goes wrong, even if they have nothing to do with it.
The Mt Gox collapse was bad, but it wasn’t their fault; it was the fault of an individual building up a debt-based pyramid scheme based on stolen bitcoins. People are now asking whether Kraken will be next…
