Kraken (cryptocurrency exchange)
cryptocurrency exchange
Kraken (legally named Payward, Inc.) is a US-based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It is the first cryptocurrency company to obtain a bank charter. In 2025, Kraken began allowing the trading of tokenized equities by non-US customers.
By 2025, it had $207 billion in quarterly trading volume and was ranked the world's fourteenth-largest crypto exchange. Beyond cryptocurrencies, in most US states the exchange also facilitates the trading of stocks, futures, and ETFs.
History
Founding and early development (2011–2014)
Kraken was founded in 2011 in San Francisco by Thanh Luu, Michael Gronager, and Jesse Powell, the latter of whom had previously founded an internet gaming startup. Before co-founding Kraken, in 2011 Powell consulted for Mt. Gox, an early bitcoin exchange in Japan, to help it recover from a hacking attack. After observing a number of security issues at Mt. Gox, Powell began working on an alternative exchange with security controls as its foundation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kraken (cryptocurrency exchange)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.