Kraken Review

Kraken is the alternative of Gemini to buy bitcoin with fiat currency. It’s founded by Jesse Powell in 2011 San Francisco. It’s a US company provides spot trading service. The last 24-hour trading volume is over 1B USD. It’s the top 10 spot trading exchange with trading volume 5 times higher than Gemini. People still like to compare Kraken and Gemini Exchange because they have many common ways to buy bitcoin. For example, both support Bank Transfer as the method to buy bitcoin.

The biggest difference from Gemini is Kraken supports the free exchange of 49 cryptocurrencies, but Gemini only supports a few of them. The latest news says Gemini will support 48 cryptocurrencies soon. That will make Gemini and Kraken no more differences.

Based on the Trustpilot 2163 customer reviews, 69% of customers left one-star reviews.

Negative reviews are coming from account verification. 

Kraken is a US company, follows US law to provide cryptocurrency trading services. It is required to do KYC and verify the users’ indication. It always takes days of verification after a user submits the ID to Kraken. The company must trace the source of funds if the user uses a Direct Deposit instead of a credit card or bank transfer. That takes days for Kraken to review it. Compared with fiat currency, most cryptocurrencies cannot be tracked. Highly recommended don’t use Direct Deposit on Kraken.

Kraken Exchange is designed for traders without any crypto trading experience and skills. Unlike Binance, Kraken is specific at spot trading. Although Kraken provides margin trading service the maximum leverage is 5X times only. 

Compared with Coinbase’s trading fee of 3.66%, Kraken’s trading fee is 0.26%. It’s lower than Binance as well. Kraken supports almost every country in the world, except those restricted by the US policy. 

It supports Forex market currencies like USD, EUR, AUD, JPY, and NZD but does not allow Forex trading.

Users can use credit cards to buy digital assets on Kraken. The security level is higher than the exchange using the cold wallet to store the cryptocurrency.To prevent money laundering, the US government requested a cryptocurrency exchange track the source of the funds. Same as Coinbase, it contains policy risks. 

Kraken did have the Market Pin issue. Feb 22, 2021, Kraken ETH suffered the market pin due to the system was corrupted. Margin trading users who were trading ETH all in margin calls. Users requested the Kraken to cover their losses. In the end, Kraken only agreed to pay up to 50% of users lost.

Unlike the OKEx market pin issue, the Kraken market pin happened due to a system error. Kraken only pays back 5% to 50% of users lost in this case which shows Kraken less experience of contract trading. The company PR tried to cover this negative news and wanted to convert it to positive, which caused Kraken traders to lose confidence in its margin trading. Many margin trading users change to Bybit to do derivative trading because Bybit used to pay back 100% of users lost in the last Bybit Market Pin issue.

Kraken customer support is slow to respond. The reason could be COVID. The user follows need to be optimized, which causes customers to push stress on the customer service. For example, Kraken allows users to deposit verifying the account but holding the deposit amount as pending status unless the user submitted the IC. The other crypto exchanges first verified the users’ accounts before allowing users to make a deposit.