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Kraken’s new CFO has a clear track record except for one

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California-based crypto exchange Kraken has recently appointed its new chief financial officer Carrie Dolan. As per the press release, Dolan is a financial services veteran in fast-growing consumer fintech and Fortune 500 firms.

Dolan replaced its former CFO, Kaiser Ng, who held the position for five years, until January 2022, when he left to join an unnamed “crypto-native remote-first organization,” as per his LinkedIn. In a statement released by Kraken, Dolan said,

“I’m excited to join this incredible company at a pivotal time.And work with the rest of the team to continue delivering on Kraken’s mission to drive mainstream adoption by making sure crypto is understood, easily accessible, and trusted.”

Prior to this role, she worked in Tradeshift, a digital payments platform, and has held several key leadership roles at Lending Club, Metromile, Charles Schwab, and Chevron. While at Lending Club, Dolan managed its 2014 IPO, securing nearly $1 billion in capital and making it one of the largest U.S.-based internet public offerings

Financial Markets Wall Street Lending Club IPO

During her stint at Lending Club, the firm managed to make a name in the peer-to-peer lending space, before going public in December 2014. Then, nearly two years after Dolan exited the company in September 2016 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged her with incorrectly adjusting fund returns to improve the returns they reported to investors.

Dolan neither admitted nor denied the charges, and paid a fine of $65,000 which was part of a larger $4.2 million penalty against Lending Club itself. The latter was barred from the securities industry as part of the punitive action.

Kraken Vs Coinbase

Despite the taint, Dolan’s experience helped firms to raise capital and go public which could fulfill what Kraken needs and has been the firm’s agenda since mid-2021. Speculators believe that might help the exchange to overtake Coinbase and occupy the top place among the world’s best crypto exchanges.

Amidst the rivalries, Kraken found itself on the same page during growing calls for a blanket ban on Russian clients. As TronWeekly previously reported, Jesse Powell, CEO of crypto exchange Kraken, in a response to Ukraine’s Vice minister’s request, tweeted that the platform would not freeze the accounts of Russian clients unless legally told to do so.

Kraken Will Giveaway $1,000 in BTC to Its Ukrainian Users

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Kraken is putting together a massive assistance package to help victims of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, with over $10 million going straight to those who have been harmed.

Clients who opened an account with Kraken before March 9, 2022, will be entitled to receive $1,000 in bitcoin, which may be withdrawn instantly from the exchange, starting tomorrow and lasting until July 1. It will also waive off currency conversion expenses of up to $1,000.

Kraken to aid the affected

“We expect to continue to be able to provide crucial financial services in a time of need to both our Ukrainian and Russian consumers,” stated Kraken CEO Jesse Powell. “At a time when many people throughout the world can no longer rely on traditional banks and custodians, cryptocurrency remains a crucial humanitarian instrument.”

Kraken will additionally contribute to the aid package an amount equal to the total trading fees paid by Russia-based clients in the first half of 2022. Further, as the crisis progresses, it may announce more help.

Kraken’s announcement represents the company’s first-ever foreign aid disbursement.

It also highlights the ongoing efforts to connect its company with the cryptocurrency community’s ideals, including the community’s firm view that all global citizens should have access to financial services.

Kraken continues to react to inquiries from governments in affected areas, and its 600-person compliance team is constantly monitoring the situation to ensure it complies with relevant sanctions laws.

It feels that this assistance program benefits both the organization and its clients, guaranteeing that no one gets disenfranchised due to the conduct of their elected officials.

This announcement comes after Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, pledged on February 27 to donate at least $10 million to major intergovernmental and nonprofit organizations already on the ground, including UNICEF, UNHCR, and the UN Refugee Agency, through its dedicated charity arm.

A sponsored crowdfunding drive has raised an extra $11 million. Each Ukrainian customer received $25 from FTX, a rival located in the Bahamas. CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the industry’s second-richest man with a wealth of more than $20 billion, announced personal cooperation with the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance to generate crypto contributions.

India’s first crypto-unicorn ramps up hiring program after crossing 10M users

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India’s foremost crypto-unicorn CoinDCX has accelerated its pace of hiring to meet the growing demand of its rapidly expanding user base. Last month, the platform achieved a new milestone when the number of users crossed more than 10 million [1 crore] from 140k at the end of 2020.

Mudita Chauhan, head, of human resources at CoinDCX, said that there has been a significant increase in the number of people being onboarded within a year. “As the business scales up, we shall see a significant rise in headcount. Next year we should be more than double where we are today and the trend should continue over a period of time,” said Chauhan.

“The huge visibility around crypto trading is pulling a lot of young people into the industry. But the underlying potential of blockchain technology and its use case not just for cryptocurrency trading and in the financial industry, but across other industries is also contributing to the heightened interest in the sector.”

As a matter of fact, hiring particularly in crypto exchanges has been focused on areas such as developers, trade operations, customer service, risk, compliance, and engineering.

Crypto firms on a massive hiring spree

Despite the current market upheaval, cryptocurrency exchange sees “enormous product opportunities ahead for the future of Web 3.” U.S. biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Coinbase is looking to take in up to 2,000 people this year as it seeks to take advantage of opportunities in the development of Web 3 and other areas, Chief People Officer L.J. Brock said in a blog post on Feb.15.

The platform, as per the announcement post, is working to expand its product, engineering, and design teams

Just a month ago, leading crypto exchange Kraken’s chief legal officer Marco Santori via Twitter set an ambitious goal of doubling the size of his team- to hire 30 lawyers in three months. Santori said he already ‘raided Wall Street’ for regulatory talent and now wants to onboard lawyers.

The competition is not only fierce but historically fierce. I don’t think the lawyer market has ever been this tight, period, full stop,” he said.

Kraken to comply with legal sanctions; turns down request to freeze Russian accounts

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Jesse Powell, CEO of crypto exchange Kraken, in a response to Ukraine’s Vice minister’s request, tweeted that the platform would not freeze the accounts of Russian clients without having a legal compulsion to do so.

The chief exec replied to Mykhailo Fedorov’s tweet saying that he understands the reason behind the request to suspend these accounts in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis. But declined the minister’s plea to prevent its Russian users from trading citing the latter should be issued such requirement beforehand.

In a series of tweets, Powell noted,

“That requirement could come from your own government, as we have seen in Canada, in response to protests, bank runs and attempts to flee the country. It could come from foreign states, like the US, as a weapon to turn the Russian populace against its government’s policies.”

Reiterating that the vast majority of crypto holders on Kraken are anti-war, Powell went on to state that it goes against the very nature of decentralization as “Bitcoin is the embodiment of libertarian values, which strongly favor individualism and human rights.”

The Kraken top boss concluded his statement by quoting, ” if we were going to voluntarily freeze financial accounts of residents of countries unjustly attacking and provoking violence around the world, step 1 would be to freeze all US accounts. As a practical matter, that’s not really a viable business option for us.”

On 28 February Fedorov who is also Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation urged all major crypto exchanges to block the wallet addresses of all Russian users irrespective of being politicians or ordinary citizens.

Major crypto exchanges have followed Kraken’s suit

As per the latest development, Coinbase too joined the list of the major trading platforms refusing to impose a full restriction despite a request from the Ukrainian official. The platform in its statement said, “We will not institute a blanket ban on all Coinbase transactions involving Russian addresses.”

Even Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, went on record to state that it has no plans to unilaterally freeze accounts in Russia. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who has several times testified before the senate about blockchain technology has remained unresponsive so far.

Kraken strikes one of the biggest deals yet; Acquires Staked

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Leading crypto exchange Kraken decided to end the year with a bang, striking one of the biggest crypto deals of 2021. The trading platform announced acquiring non-custodial crypto staking firm Staked for an unspecified amount to enhance its existing staking features and to step up its product offering game by empowering clients with more options to manage their funds. Staked would be Kraken’s fifth acquisition in 2021. Speaking more on the acquisition, Jesse Powell, CEO, and co-founder of Kraken noted,

“We are excited to add Staked to our portfolio of yield products, which has seen great uptake by a growing population of crypto investors. Staked is highly complementary to our existing staking business and will allow us to further strengthen our product offering through world-class infrastructure for clients who prefer to retain custody of their staked assets. We’re excited to welcome Staked’s clients to Kraken.”

According to the P.R, the trading platform has witnessed an overall growth of more than 430% so far this year, around the same time, its staking services have increased by a staggering 950% in November. This resulted in staking rewards worth nearly $500 million reach directly to its investors.

Kraken’s US expansion

Kraken joined other players in the U.S. market to provide crypto staking services. For instance, leading investment firm Galaxy digital acquired BitGO in May 2021 and Coinbase rolled out its staking service back in 2020. Having said that, the fourth largest crypto exchange expressed interest to go public via a direct listing in 2022 after bitcoin’s rally led to skyrocketing trading volumes. In addition to that, it had also envisaged its interest after its rival Coinbase’s decision to go public in April 2021.

As the trading platform headed into the second decade since its inception back in 2011, chief exec Jesse Powell stated that the firm would continue to add support and further its goals in Web3 technology, decentralized finance or DeFi, etc. In fact its incubation arm, Kraken Ventures recently raised $65 Million to invest across the crypto & fintech ecosystem such as Web3, DeFi, consumer crypto protocols as well as enabling technologies, like AI and Machine Learning.

Bitcoin [BTC] Hashrate hits a 7-month high to reach 180EH/s

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The Bitcoin [BTC] Hashrate has gained by more than 23% in the last 24 hours, climbing to 179.41 EH/sec since its record high on May 2021. This comes at a time when the king coin’s price has undergone a sharp price correction of more than 17% in a span of 24 hours, in contrast to the rising hash rate.

Zooming out, more than 54% of bitcoin’s collective computing power, went into a nosedive in the period between the month of June-July owing to China’s clampdown on the mining rigs. Since then, the BTC hash rate has risen by a whopping 163% from its all-time low of 68 EH/sec, five months ago.

Screenshot 2021 12 04 114313
Bitcoin [BTC] Hashrate hits a 7-month high to reach 180EH/s 3

The mining hash rate is an important metric on the security aspect. This is due to the fact that the hashing represents the computational power in the network, so the greater is the difficulty level of the network, the higher the security and its overall resistance against malicious attacks. Although BTC’s exact hashing power is not known, it is possible to estimate it from the number of blocks being created and the difficulty level of the current block.

Bitcoin [BTC] hashrate since China’s ban

The Bitcoin network hash rate is nearing its complete recovery since China’s ban this year. The communist nation which initially hosted more than 70% of the total BTC hash power, went on a massive crackdown on the mining rigs, forcing a considerable amount of miners to go offline, plummeting the hash rate to its all-time low in July. Months later the metric completely recovered and held onto its momentum.

According to a recently published report by Kraken Intelligence, following the ban, miners relocated to friendlier nations and started getting back online, which gradually increased the hash capacity and the network’s mining difficulty also started adjusting upwards. Reading along with the same, the report further noted,

“On-chain data shows that computational power deployed to the network is likely to continue heading higher and might hit a new all-time high in early December. While much-expected hash rate to hit an all-time high at the tail-end of December, the network is now pacing to beat expectations amid an ongoing surge in demand from miners. Though the latest recovery in difficulty suggests miners have by and large completed their migration to overseas locations such as North America, Kazakhstan, and Russia after being prohibited from mining in China, it’s also a testament to the confidence in miners underpinning the network.”

Shiba Inu [SHIB] to soon be listed on Kraken; Another price rally in the making?

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Shiba Inu [SHIB] has been the talk of the crypto town ever since it made a debut. The asset proved that it wasn’t just all talk as it managed to amass significant investors across the globe. Despite thriving as a meme coin, Shiba Inu secured a spot on an array of prominent crypto exchanges like Binance, Coinbase and now another popular US exchange announced that it would onboard the asset.

Most of the crypto community is active on the social media platform, Twitter. Therefore, various firms have been seeking approval from the community before inducing certain assets into their system. American cinema operator, AMC’s CEO, Adam Aron went on to set up a poll asking the public about the inclusion of Dogecoin [DOGE] as well as Shiba Inu [SHIB].

Making use of social media the right way, crypto exchange, Kraken shared a tweet regarding the listing of Shiba Inu.

Shiba Inu [SHIB] to be listed on Kraken today

Crypto exchange, Kraken took to Twitter and shared a tweet putting the “SHIB Army” to work. In the tweet, Kraken revealed that the exchange’s product lead, Brian Hoffman affirmed that Shiba Inu would be a part of the platform if the following tweet got about 2,000 likes.

The tweet read,

Shiba Inu
Shiba Inu [SHIB] to soon be listed on Kraken; Another price rally in the making? 5

In less than 24-hour of the tweet being posted, it managed to garner a whopping 56K likes with 14K retweets and about 991 quote tweets, at press time. The SHIB army has been coming in stronger than the following of other coins. The latest tweet is proof enough of the same.

Kraken happens to be the latest to jump in on the Shiba Inu train. Kraken’s rival Coinbase listed the coin several weeks ago and even caused a pump. Coinbase even added the coin’s ticker symbol SHIB in its description.

The tales surrounding SHIB are numerous. While the altcoin continues to flourish several suspect a rally on the way following the news of its latest listing.

However, during the time of writing, Shiba Inu was riding the bearish wave. The asset was trading for $0.00007064 with a 2.73% drop over the last 24-hours. While most of the assets were bagging gains, SHIB was moving in the other direction. Nevertheless, the community was seen vouching for a rally.

Ethereum Foundation receives $1.5M donation to fund Ethereum 2.0

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Ethereum Foundation has revealed that six crypto-companies have donated $250k each. According to the official announcement, the funds secured will be used to aid efforts to upgrade the Ethereum blockchain. Over the past several years, the ETH ecosystem has witnessed unprecedented developments and innovations.

To foster the growth of the blockchain, several platforms have come together and donated a total of $1.5 million. Announcing the same, Ethereum Foundation stated,

“Today, we’re excited to announce that Compound Grants, Kraken, Lido, Synthetix, The Graph and Uniswap Grants are donating $250K each to support ETH execution-layer client teams. This project is the result of several months of work, and will supplement the significant funding provided by the Ethereum Foundation this year. This fundraise will have no impact on the EFs continued financial support for these teams.”

Recipients of Ethereum Foundation’s fund

The official blog post also stated that the Ethereum Foundation has allocated more than $10 million on execution-layer client R&D since the beginning of 2019 and that it remains on its highest priority list.

The foundation reportedly picked five of its client teams- Besu, Erigon, Geth, Nethermind, and Nimbus to receive the funds. It will offer the necessary infrastructure for the network after the unification of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0. The non-profit organization asserted to the community that the additional grants will not influence its current financial support efforts.

Besides, TWJ had earlier reported Kraken’s contribution to the Ethereum Foundation to support the open-source developer teams behind ETH 2.0. In addition to the cryptocurrency exchange, the six entities include Uniswap, Synthetix, The Graph, Compound Grants Program, and lastly, Lido Finance.

Revealing the main intention behind this approach, the foundation said,

“Part of our goal with this first round is to lessen risks that come from reliance on any single team or entity as we all work to maintain quality open source products in a diverse, decentralized, and sustainable way. We continue to work towards more decentralized funding mechanisms for Ethereum’s public goods, and this is one more step that enables larger groups of participants to directly support client development and maintenance.”

Kraken gives $250,000 for Ethereum 2.0 development

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Leading cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has announced donating $250,000 to the Ethereum Foundation in a bid to support the open-source developer teams behind Ethereum 2.0. According to the official press release, the fund will be granted to developers working on nodes that maintain the network software over the following months. The exchange further mentioned that the funds would be directed to projects that drive over 80% of the distributed Ethereum network.

Kraken’s announcements come just a few weeks after Ethereum underwent a successful London hard fork which saw the blockchain network introduce five highly-awaited upgrades to its software.

Following the development, Kraken CEO and co-founder Jesse Powell stated,

“As the first major exchange to list ETH for trading, Kraken is proud once again to lead the way by giving back to the courageous builders who are hard at work on the front lines of crypto innovation.”

Kraken’s grants for Ethereum ecosystem’s development

The cryptocurrency exchange clients have reportedly staked more than 800,000 ETH, worth more than $2 billion, to secure the Beacon Chain, which happens to be the PoS version of the ETH blockchain. As a result, they have already made over 25,000 Ether in rewards via this offering by the end of July.

Besides, this is not the first time Kraken has been involved in the donation for the ETH ecosystem. As a matter of the fact, the crypto platform had previously given out grants to the decentralized ETH funding platform Gitcoin, which assisted Kraken to allocate $150,000 to the blockchain network’s infrastructure projects. Additionally, some of the other platforms to have received grants from the global exchange are Brink, BTCPay Server, and the University of Wyoming.

Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi lauded the “collaborative efforts” and stated,

“We strongly believe that collaborative efforts and support are the most sustainable way to benefit Ethereum in the long-term. This joint effort to support teams and builders that maintain a diverse set of Ethereum clients is not only impactful, but sets a great example.”

TSB Bank to ban crypto purchases citing cyber-crime concerns

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TSB Bank, which happens to be a retail and commercial bank in the UK is all set to is impose a ban on more than five million of its British banking customers sending money to two prominent cryptocurrency exchanges amid concerns associated with cyber-crime.

According to reports, the institution is gearing up to bar its customers from sending money to trading platforms such as Binance and Kraken on concern that fraudsters are being allowed to create e-wallets and steal user’s money because of poor security checks.

The bank views that Binance, which happens to be one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, as a hotbed for scammers. This is not the first time when TSB has drawn out associations between cryptocurrency and fraudulent activities. The British institution’s Head of Fraud Ashley Hart has also been vocal about crimes in the crypto sector in both newspapers as well as radio. Hart also stressed the “dramatic spike in fraud” and remarked that the existing cryptocurrency exchanges are “rife with fraudsters,” that siphoning off with massive sums as “they capitalize on the surging interest in this type of investment.”

The exec of TSB Bank was also quoted saying,

“Anyone approached to invest in crypto should be extremely wary as these approaches are overwhelmingly scams.”

TSB Bank isn’t the only British financial institution barring cryptocurrency dealings

Apart from TSB Bank, Barclays is another major bank in the United Kingdom that decided to prevent their customers from transferring money to digital currency exchanges such as Binance and SwissBor. Fintechs such as Monzo and Starling also followed the suit. While the representatives of the institutions stated that the move stemmed from bad actors in the space, they were keen on resuming services.

As per the latest stats, UK users had reportedly lost more than $82 million during the past year, most of which originated from investment scams via social media. In addition to that, almost half of 50% of such scams were linked to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.