KRAKEN

The exchange that refused to disappear

Open the Kraken app on any given Tuesday and the screen is busy in a way that would have looked like science fiction in 2013: a London fund hedging Bitcoin futures, a college student in Manila staking Solana for the first time, a payments startup wiring stablecoins across borders. All of it runs through the same plumbing, all of it settles without anyone in the chain having to say the words "trust me."

That is the whole point. Kraken, operated by parent company Payward, Inc., is one of the oldest and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. By late 2025 it counted more than 5 million funded accounts and tens of billions of dollars in client assets, and a research firm ranked it the number one global crypto exchange for the third quarter. The company has confidentially filed for an IPO. After fourteen years in an industry that eats its own, that is the part worth pausing on.

A hole where trust should have been

In 2011, crypto's biggest exchange was Mt. Gox, a Tokyo operation that had started life trading Magic: The Gathering cards. It was getting hacked. A young Californian named Jesse Powell flew help its way and spent enough time inside to see the rot: the largest gateway to Bitcoin was held together with hope and duct tape.

The problem was not that crypto was complicated. The problem was that the places where you bought it were dangerous. Money went in and sometimes did not come out. The technology promised you could be your own bank, but in practice you were handing your savings to whoever happened to run the website. Mt. Gox would later collapse and take hundreds of thousands of bitcoins with it - the most expensive lesson the industry ever paid for.

Powell's read was simple and, at the time, unfashionable: security first, features later. Most of the industry was racing to add coins and leverage. He wanted to start with the boring foundations - cold storage, audits, controls - that banks had spent a century learning to take seriously.

Three people and an unglamorous idea

Powell co-founded Kraken in 2011 with Thanh Luu and Michael Gronager, and spent two years building before letting the public in. The exchange launched in 2013. Powell's resume was not what you would draw up for a financial pioneer: a philosophy degree from Sacramento State, with a concentration in law and ethics, and a prior company called Lewt that sold virtual currency to online gamers. Which, in hindsight, was excellent training for selling digital money to people the rest of finance thought were crazy.

The founding trio: one philosopher, one builder, and one who would go on to help the world trace blockchains. Crypto attracts a specific kind of person.

The bet was that regulation was not the enemy. Most of crypto treated rules as something to dodge. Kraken did the opposite - it leaned in, registered where it could, and made compliance part of the sales pitch. It was a slower way to grow. It was also the reason it was still standing when the dodgers were not.

One roof, many ways in

Kraken is not one thing anymore. It started as a place to swap dollars for Bitcoin and grew into a financial department store for digital assets. The beginner taps "buy." The professional opens Kraken Pro, with its competitive maker and taker fees and full API. The cautious move their coins into the open-source Kraken Wallet and hold the keys themselves. The aggressive trade futures with leverage up to 50x. The patient stake more than twenty assets and let them earn.

The same exchange that sells your first $20 of Bitcoin will also clear an institution's derivatives book. Few companies stretch that far.

Receipts, not vibes

Crypto runs on claims. Kraken's quieter contribution was making some of those claims checkable. It became known for regular Proof of Reserves attestations - cryptographic evidence that the coins it says it holds are actually there. In an industry where the gap between "we have your funds" and reality has wiped out millions of people, that is not a marketing flourish. It is the whole job.

The numbers Kraken likes to lead with. Notice it leads with "founded" - in crypto, surviving is the flex.

The acquisitions tell the same story in dollars. The $1.5 billion purchase of NinjaTrader in 2025 was a shortcut into regulated US crypto futures. The buys of Bitnomial and Reap pushed deeper into derivatives and stablecoin payments. CF Benchmarks, bought back in 2019, quietly supplies reference rates that other regulated crypto products lean on. And Kraken feeds market data straight to the Bloomberg Terminal, the screen that Wall Street actually watches.

Financial freedom, minus the asterisks

Kraken's stated mission is to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrency so people everywhere can reach financial freedom and inclusion. It is the kind of line every crypto company prints. What makes it slightly more believable here is that the company has spent fourteen years optimizing for the unsexy half of that promise - the "your money is safe" half - rather than the "get rich quick" half that sold so many of its rivals into the ground.

It is incorporated in Wyoming, the most crypto-friendly state in the country, while running its operations out of San Francisco. It is remote-first and openly political about crypto rights. Its founder once tangled publicly with a San Francisco housing co-op, which tells you something about a man who built a company on the idea that institutions do not always get to decide what you can own.

The grown-up in the room

Crypto is at the awkward stage where it wants to be taken seriously by the same financial system it was built to route around. That requires somebody to be the grown-up: regulated, audited, boring in the right places. Kraken has spent over a decade auditioning for exactly that role, and the IPO filing is the audition's final act - growing up in public, with the books open.

So return to that Tuesday morning. The fund in London, the student in Manila, the payments startup moving stablecoins. None of them think about whether the exchange will still exist tomorrow, or whether the coins on screen are really there. That absence of worry is the product. It took fourteen years, a dropped lawsuit, a few billion dollars of acquisitions, and a founder who learned his lesson inside a burning exchange in 2011. The sea monster is still swimming. These days, it mostly does so in calm water - which, for crypto, is the rarest thing of all.