Jesse Powell and the price of admission

A sword that exists only inside a video game is an awkward thing to explain to a banker. Someone wants it. Someone else has it. Money must travel between them. For Jesse Powell, who began selling virtual game goods in 2001, the troublesome part was often the payment rather than the sword. Years before he co-founded Kraken, he was already working in an economy where digital possessions had real customers and the financial system struggled to accommodate them.

His company, Lewt, dealt in items and currencies for online games. Players might be buying an advantage, saving themselves hours of work or pursuing something scarce. The goods were intangible; the transactions were perfectly tangible. Fees, chargebacks and international payments could make an apparently straightforward sale expensive or uncertain. A young customer might want to buy something without having a credit card. A willing customer in another country might encounter suspicion before the transaction even began.

Powell had spent his teenage years playing Magic: The Gathering in tournaments around the country. That background makes his later career less surprising. A trading card game gives its participants a small economy with rules, scarcity and competing judgments of value. A card can be cardboard and still command money. A digital item can be a collection of pixels and still be worth somebody's afternoon. The people doing the trading rarely need a lecture on why they care.

In 2011, Bitcoin presented him with a payment system that spoke directly to those difficulties. He had a decade of business experience against which to test the idea. The appeal included the prospect of reaching customers whom conventional payment arrangements made hard to serve. His interest in financial inclusion came with a merchant's practical question: can this person actually pay? That is a useful starting point for someone who would spend the next twelve years running an exchange.

“Bitcoin was solving problems”

Jesse Powell, recalling his gaming business in 2018

A warehouse with no rent to pay

There was another market Powell wanted to make room for. In Sacramento, his artist friends were working in cramped domestic spaces. The kitchen could become a studio, which is admirable for art and inconvenient for dinner. With money from his gaming business, he rented a warehouse and offered artists free space. The project that became Verge began with a proposition sufficiently unusual that some prospective tenants suspected a scam.

Verge's early commercial gallery combined contemporary exhibitions with twenty free artist studios. Powell funded the original enterprise himself. Working with founding director Liv Moe, he later sought premises that could support a more sustainable nonprofit institution. Verge relocated to S Street in April 2010; the larger building allowed the studio count to grow to thirty-seven and made room for galleries, a classroom and printmaking facilities.

Here was an access problem with a physical address. An artist needed somewhere to work, and a city needed places to encounter contemporary art. Powell's intervention supplied space before demanding that every occupant produce a convincing business plan. Free studios also brought artists together. A person who had made money through transactions conducted across screens was spending it on a place where people could meet.

The gallery and the game marketplace make an instructive pair. In one, Powell helped customers obtain things they wanted. In the other, he helped artists obtain the conditions for making things. Neither requires imagining that he approached life with a tidy master plan. They do show a recurring interest in the arrangements around creative work: the payment channel, the studio, the point at which someone can enter.

Two weeks in Tokyo

Then came an unusually direct education in what an exchange could get wrong. In June 2011, Powell flew to Tokyo to help Mt. Gox recover from a hack. Roger Ver also helped. Mt. Gox was an important gateway into Bitcoin, which made its operational problems everybody else's problem too. Powell spent two weeks there. He came away convinced that the growing Bitcoin economy needed another exchange, built with stronger controls.

Kraken was founded on July 28, 2011. Powell and fellow founder Thanh Luu brought experience from the virtual goods business; Michael Gronager was also involved in Kraken's early founding story. The public launch came in September 2013. Between the decision to build and the opening for customers lay roughly two years, an interval worth noticing in an industry whose excitement can sometimes outrun its plumbing.

An exchange has an unglamorous obligation hiding beneath its trading interface. It receives assets, maintains records and lets customers get their money back. Bitcoin's design gives people a way to transact without a central monetary authority. An exchange introduces a company into that relationship. The contradiction is part of the business: an accessible entrance to a decentralized system can itself become a concentrated point of dependence.

Powell's origin story puts that problem close to the beginning. He had seen a gateway fail while people were depending on it. Building a replacement required making security an operating concern rather than a reassuring adjective. The name Kraken supplied the sea monster. The more consequential work involved systems that customers would usually notice only when something went wrong.

The unlikely return to Mt. Gox

In November 2014, Kraken was selected to help with the Mt. Gox bankruptcy investigation and the distribution of remaining assets. It subsequently offered a route for creditors to file claims. Powell's company had grown out of his exposure to an early Mt. Gox failure; now it was being asked to help handle the consequences of the exchange's collapse. The connection gave Kraken's founding rationale an uncomfortable practical relevance.

By 2015, Powell was resisting the idea that Bitcoin had smoothly matured into conventional finance. In an interview, he challenged assumptions about how to recognize a secure exchange and whether the industry had changed as quickly as its public image suggested. His attention remained on the mechanics. A polished presentation and venture funding could coexist with unresolved questions about custody and accountability.

That concern helps explain his later emphasis on proof of reserves. Kraken has used the process to let clients verify that their balances are included in reserve checks. In a November 2022 television appearance, Powell urged people evaluating trading venues to examine their history and whether they had conducted such checks. The advice asks customers to examine evidence instead of stopping at the confidence of the person selling the service.

For an exchange founder, this is a peculiar sales position. The customer is being encouraged to remain skeptical of exchanges, including the category from which the founder earns his living. It also fits the experience that brought Powell into the business. When an intermediary holds an asset, the important question survives every improvement in the website: what can the owner verify?

The pirate has rules

Powell's public manner has often been less restrained than his preferred approach to custody. In 2015, Kraken withdrew service from New York rather than operate under the state's BitLicense framework. His objections became part of the company's identity. He could be blunt about the burden of regulatory arrangements, and he was willing to give up a market rather than accept terms he opposed.

The same libertarian outlook appeared in his response to calls for cryptocurrency exchanges to freeze all Russian customers' accounts after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Powell said Kraken could not impose that blanket freeze without a legal requirement. His position distinguished an individual account holder from a government's actions, while acknowledging that legal requirements could change. It was a stance that drew attention well beyond the usual exchange customer.

Inside Kraken, the effort to define that outlook became contentious. In June 2022, Powell publicly addressed disagreements over company culture. His comments on race and gender drew criticism, and the company offered an exit option to employees who did not want to remain. A document describing Kraken's values made commitment to its cryptocurrency mission central to the workplace.

Its pirate imagery was memorable, but the underlying issue was serious. A founder can consider uncompromising speech a virtue while colleagues experience the same behavior as exclusionary. An organization serving a global customer base must also persuade a varied workforce to collaborate. Powell's insistence on a shared mission made the boundaries explicit. It did not make agreement automatic.

The culture document also described founders accustomed to remote work and a company that prized skill over formal presentation. Later, Kraken credited Powell with originating its global employee retreats. Remote work and occasional gatherings were ways of organizing people who did not share an office. The founder's influence reached beyond what Kraken sold into how its employees spent their working lives.

“Great talent, bad fit.”

Powell's description of some employees during the 2022 culture dispute

Leaving the chair with the most meetings

In September 2022, Kraken announced that chief operating officer Dave Ripley would succeed Powell as CEO. The handover became official in April 2023, with Powell becoming chairman of the board. The distinction matters: the announcement and the actual transfer of responsibility were separated by months. After leading the company from its founding, he was changing the nature of his involvement.

Powell said he wanted more time for products, user experience and industry advocacy. That is a fairly revealing list. It brings him back to the experience of the person using a service and the larger conditions under which that service can exist. The chairmanship retained his connection to Kraken while giving day-to-day executive responsibility to someone who had already spent years scaling its operations.

His activities outside Kraken also brought a difficult public chapter. Federal investigators examined allegations involving access to Verge's computer accounts, and his home was searched. Powell denied wrongdoing. In April 2025, the federal investigation was closed without criminal charges; the closure became public in July. The dispute makes the arts project part of a more complicated personal history than its appealing opening scene alone would suggest.

By March 2026, Kraken was still describing Powell's culture document as foundational to the company's work. Employees were expected to use the products themselves and report friction, with a formal program supporting that participation. Here was an institutional version of his old merchant's habit: understand the system by encountering what a customer encounters. A payment problem is harder to dismiss when it happens to you.

And at Bitcoin 2026, according to Kraken, Powell hosted a Magic: The Gathering tournament. The teenage tournament player had not disappeared inside the exchange chairman. After years of debate about custody, regulation and who should be allowed to transact, there were still cards to play. It is a pleasingly ordinary detail in a career devoted to unfamiliar money: the games were never merely a preface.