One of the leading U.S. exchanges, Kraken, plans to expand its reach beyond the United States by obtaining a license for operating on the European market. During an interview for а German media, Kraken’s CEO Jesse Powell noted that the exchange is already in process of acquiring a license for crypto trading in Europe.
Kraken’s CEO expects the licensing procedure to be finished before the end of 2021. However, Powell did not mention the possible jurisdiction of operations but noted that Kraken is looking at Malta, Luxembourg, or Ireland as possible operations headquarters in Europe.
This is not Kraken’s first European licensing ordeal, as the company got approved by the UK regulatory authorities, but after Brexit, the license lost its validity within the European Union zone. Furthermore, Kraken’s top rival – Coinbase, became the first major U.S.-based crypto exchange to operate in Germany.
However, Kraken plans to go on a different route than Coinbase, as Germany’s BaFIN regulatory framework is too complex, restrictive, and expensive to be attractive to the company, according to Powell.
Kraken, on the other hand, has an advantage over Coinbase in the face of a special purpose depository institution (SPDI) charter, issued by the Wyoming Banking Board, which voted to approve Kraken’s application.
Meanwhile, Kraken may try to walk Coinbase’s path towards a public listing, in addition to its expansion into Europe. Kraken’s CEO emphasized that the exchange is dealing with the same complex regulatory paperwork, but thanks to Coinbase, the path to regulatory approval is cleared.
“We have to work through a huge checklist with 1000 tasks. For us, it’s good that Coinbase was the first to go public.,” Powell noted.
Furthermore, Powell revealed Kraken’s CEO announced that the exchange plans to enter both the NFT and DeFi ecosystems.
“We would like to have a marketplace through which people can trade NFTs. I believe we will see a number of applications for NFTs in the coming years,” Powell concluded.
In the meantime, on August 24th the Ethereum Foundation announced that Kraken donated a quarter of a million U.S. dollars towards the client teams working on the Ethereum (ETH) 2.0 upgrade. Apart from Kraken, five more companies donated funds, including Compound Grants, Lido, Synthetix, The Graph, and Uniswap Grants.
Kraken’s CEO elaborated on the donation, stating that the company is giving back to the courageous builders who are hard at work on the front lines of crypto innovation.”
Data from Kraken suggest that over 800,000 ETH tokens have been already staked in ETH2.0 onto the exchange which worth over $2.5 billion at current prices. The exchange also announced the over 25,300 ETH have been distributed as reward to their clients who stake.