Kraken decides to suspend support for USDT & 4 other major crypto assets

Kraken decided to terminate the trading of USDT & some wrapped crypto & stablecoin assets from the platform for Canadian customers.

Kraken is a US-based popular crypto exchange, founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell, an alumnus of California State University, Sacramento with Thanh Luu and Michael Gronager. Officially this platform started its crypto services in Feb 2013 but grabbed a better customer base after the collapse & bankruptcy of the top level Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox.

On 28 Oct 2023, The Kraken’s Canadian customers received an email from the Kraken exchange.

Kraken informed all the Canadian customers that the exchange will suspend trading & transactions of Tether (USDT), Dai, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Wrapped Ether (WET), and Wrapped Axelar (WAXL). 

Kraken’s this decision will come into effect from Nov of this year. 

Crypto exchange Kraken will suspend all trading related to USDT, DAI, WBTC, WETH and WAXL in Canada. As of November 30, deposit and trading functionality for the above assets will be discontinued. Effective December 5th, any remaining underlying assets will be converted to USD at…

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) October 28, 2023

The email note failed to explain the reason behind this decision but in another email note to the popular crypto news website Cointelegraph, a Kraken spokesperson provided the main reason.

The Kraken spokesperson said that the Kraken team continuously monitors the listed assets on the platform and in the latest monitoring they found these mentioned assets not in compliance with the Kraken rules & laws in the Canadian jurisdiction.

According to Canadian crypto investors, Kraken’s decision was not strange for them because already top crypto exchanges CryptoCom & Coinbase suspended their support for USDT, DAI, and RAI. 

This year, the Canadian financial regulators brought new strict rules against crypto companies. Following the new rules & laws, OKX & Binance announced their plan to wind up their operations from Canada.

Some reports noted that the majority of the crypto companies found that it was not profitable business to provide crypto services in Canada, because of very high strict laws & taxes. Some companies said that laws were better enough to run a business.

Read also: Binance CEO CZ’s wealth plunges $11.9B as trade volume on the exchange reduced