What this exchange is
Kraken has run since 2011 out of San Francisco under US regulation. It has no exchange token of its own — not an oversight but a consequence: a token promising discounts and yield is something a regulator may treat as a security.
Age and regulation give it a standing most venues in our coverage lack. The price is fewer coins and slower listings.
The defining trait: real dollars
Almost everything on Kraken is quoted against USD rather than USDT: around seven hundred dollar pairs against fewer than fifty USDT ones. That follows directly from banking relationships offshore exchanges do not have.
This matters to us twice over. First, Kraken and Coinbase are how we compute the real dollar rate in the stablecoin section: without a live USD pair there is nothing to measure USDT’s deviation against.
Second, in cross-exchange arbitrage we take only the USDT pairs from Kraken. Putting a dollar pair up against other exchanges’ USDT pairs would present the very deviation of USDT from the dollar as an arbitrage opportunity.
Fees
Here is the real surprise: the entry tier costs 0.80% taker and 0.40% maker — eight and four times the 0.1% usual at offshore venues. The rate falls with thirty-day volume, but reaching 0.20% taker takes a quarter of a million dollars traded in a month.
For arbitrage that settles almost everything. Two trades at the entry tier eat 1.6%, and a cross-exchange spread that size appears a handful of times a month and lasts seconds. Kraken makes sense in routes only for those who have already earned a high tier.
Futures and funding
Perpetuals live on a separate host, around three hundred of them. Kraken publishes the funding rate in dollars per contract per hour rather than as a fraction of price, unlike everyone else. We divide by the index price to bring it into line — otherwise comparing it with other venues would be meaningless.
Funding accrues hourly rather than every eight hours. On delta-neutral setups that changes the maths: the same rate per hour yields eight times the APR of an eight-hour one.
What is missing
Kraken has no P2P at all — fiat moves by bank transfer. It does not publish coin withdrawal fees publicly either; they are available only to an authenticated request, so Kraken does not appear in our transfers section.
