- Founded
- 2011
- Headquarters
- United States
- Taker fee
- 0.26%
- 24h spot volume
- $1.4B
- Solvency evidence8.0
- Security record9.0
- Trading fees5.9
- Liquidity6.5
On the record against Kraken
2- Securities and Exchange CommissionDismissed3 March 2025
The SEC dismissed, with prejudice, its November 2023 suit alleging Kraken ran an unregistered exchange — no penalty, no admission, and no change required to the business.
The complaint was filed on 11 November 2023 and survived a motion to dismiss in August 2024, so this was a live case rather than a weak one. The Commission said the dismissal rests on its judgment that it will help reform its approach to the crypto industry and "not on any assessment of the merits of the claims alleged". It costs this record nothing, because nothing was decided against the company — but a reader who remembers the headlines is entitled to find the ending here.
Securities and Exchange Commission — the authority’s own document · United States · Brought and dropped. Nothing decided against the firm.
- Securities and Exchange CommissionDecided9 February 2023
Payward Ventures Inc and Payward Trading Ltd agreed to pay $30m and to stop offering their crypto staking-as-a-service programme to US customers, settling SEC charges that it was an unregistered offer and sale of securities.
The SEC said the programme, run since 2019, advertised returns as high as 21% a year, and that customers handing over tokens "lose control of those tokens and take on risks associated with those platforms, with very little protection". The $30m is disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties together. It is a registration and disclosure matter about one product, not a finding about customer funds.
Securities and Exchange Commission — the authority’s own document · United States · The authority made this finding.
None of this moves the score on this page. The weights are published on the methodology page and they read licences, costs, payments, platforms and disclosures — there is no component for what an authority has done, and adding a penalty nobody could see would be worse than the gap. It is written here instead, above everything good about this broker, which is where we think it belongs.
Score breakdown
Method- Solvency evidence25%8.0
proof of reserves · third-party audit
- Security record20%9.0
No customer-funds breach on record
- Trading fees14%5.9
0.26% taker · 0.16% maker
- Liquidity10%6.5
$1.4B reported 24h spot volume
- Regulatory and legal record15%8.5
1 on record: fine
- Transparency8%10.0
3 of 3 disclosures published
- Evidence behind this record8%7.0
Read against an outside document, not at the company’s own pages
Fees and liquidity
- Taker fee
- 0.26%
- Maker fee
- 0.16%
- Reported 24h spot volume
- $1.4B
- Type
- Centralised
- Founded
- 2011
- Headquarters
- US
Solvency and security
- Proof of reserves
- Published
- Third-party audit
- Yes
- Publicly listed
- No
- Last customer-funds breach
- None on record
- Users made whole
- —
- Insurance fund
- No
An exchange is a counterparty, not a wallet.
What we checked on Kraken
17 Sept 2026Two SEC matters, and they ended differently: a $30m settlement in 2023 over the staking product, and a 2023 exchange-registration suit the SEC dropped with prejudice in 2025 after losing a motion to dismiss. No customer-funds breach on record in fourteen years.
The staking settlement, which was about one product
On 9 February 2023 Payward Ventures Inc and Payward Trading Ltd agreed to pay $30m and to stop offering their crypto staking-as-a-service programme to US customers, settling SEC charges that the programme was an unregistered offer and sale of securities 1.
The SEC’s objection was about disclosure rather than about missing money. It said the programme had advertised returns as high as 21% a year since 2019, and that customers handing over tokens "lose control of those tokens and take on risks associated with those platforms, with very little protection" 1. The $30m is disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties together. Nobody alleged customer assets went missing, and the fine ages out of this site’s conduct component on the same schedule as any other.
The case they fought and the SEC dropped
The second matter is the one worth knowing about, and it is the one most summaries get backwards. The SEC filed on 11 November 2023, alleging Kraken ran an unregistered exchange. Kraken moved to dismiss and lost that motion in August 2024, so the case was live and had survived the court’s first look at it. On 3 March 2025 the SEC dismissed it with prejudice, with no penalty, no admission and no change required to the business 2.
The Commission was explicit that the decision "rests on its judgment that the dismissal will facilitate the Commission’s ongoing efforts to reform and renew its regulatory approach to the crypto industry, not on any assessment of the merits of the claims alleged" 2. That is a careful sentence and this page repeats it rather than paraphrasing: the case was dropped, and the regulator declined to say the case was wrong.
The 2024 incident, and why the record still says no breach
This page claims no customer-funds breach in fourteen years, and a reader who follows crypto will immediately think of June 2024, so it is worth meeting directly. A researcher reported a bug through Kraken’s bounty programme that let a user inflate their balance by starting a deposit and spending the funds before it cleared. Rather than stop at a proof of concept, the finder and two others withdrew about $3m and refused to give it back until Kraken met their terms — which Kraken called extortion rather than white-hat work 3.
The money came out of Kraken’s own treasury, not out of customer balances, and it was returned in full about ten days later minus fees. So the record’s `lastBreachYear` of null is accurate on its own terms — the field asks about customer funds — and a page that silently relied on that technicality would be doing the thing this site exists to catch. It was a real exploit of a real bug in a live system, it was found by someone outside, and it is here.
The figures, and where each one came from
- Entities in the staking settlement1
- Payward Ventures Inc and Payward Trading Ltd
- Staking settlement1
- $30m, 9 February 2023
- Staking programme returns advertised1
- Up to 21% a year, since 2019
- Exchange case filed2
- 11 November 2023
- Motion to dismiss2
- Denied, August 2024
- Exchange case dismissed2
- 3 March 2025, with prejudice, no penalty
- 2024 bug exploit3
- About $3m, from Kraken’s treasury rather than customer balances
- Returned3
- In full, about ten days later, less fees
Still open
- Kraken has a proof of reserves and a third-party audit on this record, and nobody here has opened either document. The component reads that they exist, which is weaker than reading them.
- Kraken is not on Japan’s list of unregistered crypto-asset exchange operators where four of the other seven are. Whether that is because it holds a registration or because it stays out of the market is not settled here.
Sources
3- 1Kraken to discontinue unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset staking-as-a-service program and pay $30 million to settle SEC charges
Securities and Exchange CommissionRegulator noticepublished 9 Feb 2023read 17 Sept 2026
- 2Litigation release — SEC v. Payward, Inc. and Payward Ventures, Inc. (d/b/a “Kraken”)
Securities and Exchange CommissionRegulator noticepublished 3 Mar 2025read 17 Sept 2026
- 3Kraken says hackers turned to “extortion” after exploiting bug for $3M
CoinDeskTrade presspublished 19 Jun 2024read 17 Sept 2026
Every link goes to the document, not to a summary of it, and where it does not we say so on the entry. They carry nofollow like every other outbound link here, and none of them is an affiliate link — a source you are paid to cite is not a source. Where we have any connection to a publisher, it is printed above rather than left for you to find out.
What customers say
0 publishedNobody has written about this one yet. Reviews here are read, not counted: this ranking’s model was published without a reviews component.
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Kraken — common questions
Is Kraken safe?
Kraken has no customer-funds breach on record. On solvency evidence it is audited by a named third party and publishes a proof of reserves. Neither is a guarantee — an exchange is a counterparty, and holding coins on one means trusting it.
What does Kraken charge?
0.26% taker and 0.16% maker at the lowest tier. Fee tiers fall with volume, so most readers pay the figures quoted here.
Does Kraken publish a proof of reserves?
Yes. Remember what that is: a snapshot the exchange chooses to publish, unaudited, saying nothing about liabilities. It is real evidence, but weaker than an audit.