The financial tricks of crypto giant Kraken

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher
In April 2026, Kraken secretly restarted its IPO application, accepted a $200 million investment from Deutsche Börse, and launched the Ink Points rewards system on Kraken Pro. The community views the points system as an entry point for accumulating $INK investment qualifications, and farming strategies quickly went viral on X.

Valuation Shrinks by One Third

Kraken's path to IPO has not been smooth.

In November 2025, the company completed $800 million in financing, with top institutions like Citadel Securities and Jane Street participating, pushing its valuation to a peak of $20 billion. At the same time, the company secretly submitted an IPO application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Image source: RootData

However, the global market conditions then took a sharp downturn, with the stock prices of several previously listed crypto companies falling significantly, leading Kraken to freeze its IPO plans earlier this year.

Recently, co-CEO Arjun Sethi officially confirmed the restart of the IPO application at the Semafor World Economic Conference in Washington. At this point, Kraken's latest valuation is approximately $13.3 billion, a 33% decrease from its peak.

Currently, the probability of betting on Kraken's IPO closing market value exceeding $16 billion on Polymarket is 44%, while the probability of exceeding $20 billion is 24%.

The Investment from Deutsche Börse Represents a Complete Channel

In the same week that the IPO restart news was announced, Deutsche Börse announced the acquisition of approximately 1.5% of the fully diluted equity of Kraken's parent company Payward for $200 million, with the transaction completed through the secondary market.

While the amount may not seem large, the significance of this investment goes far beyond financial aspects.

Deutsche Börse owns the Clearstream custody and settlement system, the 360T foreign exchange trading platform, and the Eurex derivatives exchange, making it one of the most important traditional financial infrastructure providers globally. According to its official statement, the goal of this investment is to establish a unified liquidity pool that handles both traditional securities and blockchain-native tokens.

This investment also deepens the commercial partnership between the two parties—integrating Kraken's xStocks tokenized stock platform into Deutsche Börse's digital asset infrastructure.

It is reported that Kraken launched futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) in October 2025, allowing its users to trade traditional commodities and stock index contracts as well as cryptocurrencies. Its xStocks tokenized stock product surpassed $10 billion in cumulative trading volume in November last year.

According to the latest data from rwa.xyz, as of April 17, xStocks has a total position size of approximately $302 million in the tokenized stock sector, ranking second globally, only behind Ondo.

In March of this year, Nasdaq also announced that it chose Kraken as the settlement layer for its tokenized stock program.

At the same time, Kraken was approved for a Federal Reserve master account this year, becoming the first crypto exchange to directly access the U.S. federal payment system. This move has raised concerns among some members of Congress about systemic risk, but it also indicates that Kraken's penetration into the traditional financial system is far deeper than public perception.

Kraken has also completed two acquisitions: NinjaTrader enhanced its institutional derivatives capabilities, while Backed Finance provided a closed-loop support for the RWA compliance path of xStocks.

From fiat payments to institutional trading to on-chain assets, this channel is gradually taking shape.

Another noteworthy background is that in March 2025, the SEC voluntarily withdrew its lawsuit against Kraken. The shift in the regulatory environment is an important premise for Kraken to choose to advance all actions simultaneously at this time.

Image source: RootData

Key Details of the $INK Token Still Awaiting Disclosure

In addition to the IPO and TradFi collaboration, Kraken is also advancing a project aimed at on-chain users.

On April 6, Kraken Pro officially launched the Ink Points rewards system, with Season 1 starting to accumulate points. Points are earned through spot trading, holdings, staking on Kraken Pro, and on-chain activities such as using the Nado perpetual contract DEX and Tydro lending protocol within the Ink L2 ecosystem.

It is reported that both Nado and Tydro are native protocols of the Ink ecosystem, without independent VC financing, relying on user flow from Kraken.

The Ink Foundation officially announced the issuance and airdrop of the $INK token in June 2025, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. The official positioning is "liquidity-first," anchored to actual product usage rather than governance or speculation.

According to advisors from Ink Chain, the TGE time window is expected in the second half of 2026, but how points will convert to tokens and the complete tokenomics have not been officially confirmed. The community expects that 45% of the total supply of $INK will be allocated to airdrop rewards, which is considered a high allocation among similar L2 projects, but this data is also pending official confirmation.

What Coinbase's Path Means for Kraken

As the second-largest centralized exchange in the U.S., Kraken cannot avoid being compared to Coinbase.

In 2021, Coinbase went public on Nasdaq with the story of being the "first stock of a crypto exchange." After its listing, its stock price experienced significant volatility, and it has nearly halved since its peak in July 2025, with a market capitalization of approximately $52.7 billion.

After Coinbase, several other exchanges have entered the capital market. The concept of "crypto exchange listing" has been consumed more than once.

This presents Kraken with its first real question: Will Wall Street still pay a premium for the same story?

Kraken's answer is to position itself as an infrastructure platform rather than an exchange. The investment from Deutsche Börse, the Federal Reserve master account, the Nasdaq collaboration, and xStocks—all these moves point to a different valuation logic.

BNB Chain and Base have validated the feasibility of combining platform tokens with L2, but another issue is that the first-mover advantage has already been taken by others.

Thus, Kraken now needs to persuade two types of audiences simultaneously. Wall Street seeks regulatory certainty and predictable profit models; on-chain users want quick token issuance and fulfillment of airdrop promises. The pace and interests of these two sides are not aligned.

Where is Kraken's Space Amid Strong Competition?

Notable KOL @_FORAB stated that if Kraken's Ink completes its token issuance before going public, it will become one of the few exchanges in the crypto space with its own public chain and platform token while planning to list in the U.S. Historically, Kraken has been one of the more friendly North American exchanges towards the Chinese market, having opened Chinese KYC support relatively early.

Another KOL @Siberiaxx1909 positions Kraken as a "disruptor among the five major Chinese exchanges."

Currently, the Chinese exchange market is dominated by Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, and Gate, each with clear moats and deeply bound users.

• Binance has formed a liquidity flywheel with a 32% market share in spot trading, 40% in derivatives, and 73.5% in top custody funds;
• OKX relies on over 5 million monthly active users of its Web3 wallet and deep cross-chain infrastructure to enhance user stickiness;
• Bybit maintains an open interest of $7-10 billion in derivatives and builds trust with its full compensation capability in extreme events;
• Bitget occupies the social trading mindset with 1.1 million copy trading users and over 110 million copy trading transactions;
• Gate has become one of the preferred venues for new coin discovery with over 4,500 listed coins.

Kraken does not hold advantages in these dimensions, and from the company's recent layout, its intention is clearly aimed at the RWA sector. Its real advantages lie in compliance licenses, the Federal Reserve master account, and institutional-grade RWA product lines.

Specifically, stock products from Binance and OKX are typically presented in the form of synthetic assets or contracts for difference, where users hold derivatives tracking stock prices rather than actual underlying holdings. Kraken, through its acquisition of Backed Finance, has integrated xStocks to achieve a closed loop of real stock custody, a compliance depth currently unmatched in the Chinese market.

This means Kraken is not trying to compete head-on in retail high-frequency trading, derivatives depth, or coin variety, but is attempting to carve out a differentiated path of "compliance + RWA + self-built L2 ecosystem."

However, whether this differentiated path can translate into actual user growth is another question.

Analysis points out that Kraken currently faces several barriers in the Chinese market: cumbersome KYC processes, lack of P2P deposit channels, the split between the Kraken and Kraken Pro apps, and weak response from Chinese customer service. Without addressing these localization shortcomings, the advantages of compliance and institutional capabilities will be difficult to reach target users.

Finally

Ultimately, the direction of this competition is no longer just a story about Kraken alone. As crypto exchanges have reached this point, the traffic dividend has long peaked, and the competition among them is essentially a game of existing stock.

Kraken's choice to simultaneously advance its IPO, TradFi collaboration, and on-chain ecosystem at this time is likely a bet on a different source of growth: that after institutional funds enter, the RWA sector matures, and the regulatory framework clarifies, a new batch of users and new funds will enter this industry, and what these people need is not lower fees or more coins, but compliant, trustworthy infrastructure that can connect with the traditional financial system.