The Kraken exchange is operated by the San Francisco-based Payward Inc., the company is not under direct regulation by any agency. Founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell, this exchange has become one of the best and most secure Bitcoin exchanges. Kraken is trusted by hundreds of thousands of traders and has clients from North America, Europe and Japan. This exchange has support for an increasingly wide range of cryptocurrencies as well as fiat currencies. Kraken has a very popular platform that provides an exceptional Bitcoin exchange experience for the professional crypto traders and occasional users. This trading platform offers fast execution, innovative features, good support, and high security. Kraken supports margin trading and has very low fees compared to other more “beginner-friendly” exchanges. Customer funds reside in a bank account separate from Kraken’s operations account, and fees are transferred on a daily basis (customer funds cannot be borrowed). Fees depend on the tier in which your account belongs and are calculated as percentages of trade volumes, they range between 0% and 0.26%.

Website hacking has been on the rise lately, especially concerning cryptocurrency exchanges. The exchange hasn’t yet suffered a major hack. However, there are a few alleged reports by individuals, who claim their accounts were hacked. It is hard to verify their claims or if they aren’t to blame for mistakes like having a weak password or not enabling two-factor authentication. According to analysts, this exchange is also one of the safest that currently operate. Their security team is continually improving our end-to-end security measures, improving auditing processes, and reducing the ‘attack surface’ of their infrastructure. The company’s overall reputation is very good and Kraken stands as a reliable partner. They use a tiered system for account verification at Kraken which ranges from just facilitating digital asset deposit and trading on the lower end to processing fiat deposits and withdrawals on the higher end. Users can deposit and withdraw EUR, USD, CAD, GBP, Japanese Yen, bitcoins and other digital currencies. Kraken offers a free deposit for Euro, Canadian dollar, and Japanese yen. Fiat deposits and withdrawals are completed through SEPA, Swift, and bank wires (Fees vary from 0 – $10). Kraken makes no promises/guarantees/warranties on the outcome of potential or proposed forks, but the company will make its best effort to handle things in a way that benefits the most clients. On the official website, you can not find a live chat but you can send a message anytime via email. I have also found some reviews about Kraken’s unresponsive customer support. Kraken is active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Experiences with Kraken

The company’s overall reputation is very good and Kraken stands as a reliable partner. I did not find any incidents and complaints that make this exchange not reliable, the user reviews about Kraken are fairly mixed. Complaints vary from a slow processing of deposits, lack of response by the customer support to stop-loss orders not triggering. I also found some negative reviews on the forums but this is connected with the situation that Kraken has been unprepared for a surge of new users and surge in trading in last several months. The following quotes give you a sense of what other traders think about this cryptocurrency exchange:

• I have been trying to get verified Tier 3 for 3 weeks now as my documentation was finally accepted a week ago, but still, I am not verified Tier 3 as that is the only way that one can deposit US Funds in order to purchase Ripple
• Was offline the last 2 days due to IT issues – enough said.
• Overall, I am very satisfied with them. Have twice transferred around 9000 USD. Each time took 2.5 days, very acceptable indeed
• The customer services are unacceptable, huge delays, no help at all
• Kraken is a little slow compared with Bitfinex
• Kraken has a very good trading platform and the fees provided by Kraken are in line with offerings by other exchanges

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