The San Francisco-based Kraken is one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges nowadays. It is also considered the largest Bitcoin exchange based on the EUR volume, liquidity as well as the trading of Canadian dollars, US dollars, British pounds and Japanese yen.

What started as an attempt to create a place where people would send and receive Bitcoin in 2011 led to the first Bitcoin exchange which has a trading price and volume displayed in the Bloomberg Terminal. Kraken is also the first exchange which passed a cryptographically verifiable proof-of-reserves audit.

 

 

The company has a very good reputation since it was able to remain resilient to major hacks and also was chosen as the platform by the creditors of Mt.Gox received their claims. Kraken was chosen as a reliable partner to help the facilitation of the payments to the creditors. Also, the exchange operates a dark pool which is a private security exchange that allows large financial institutions and wealthy individuals to make anonymous trades.

The exchange has a very basic interface and a detailed documentation option to help the beginners to provide them a bigger knowledge towards more advanced traders. There is also an iOS mobile app that the users can download and access it via multiple devices. The platform’s liquidity is on a very high level which allows for the fast funding of accounts and high trading volumes. The exchange has Proof of Reserves Audits and is the leader in performing cryptographically-verified auditing.

Kraken has cold storage techniques that secure the funds as well as using the PGP/GPG encryption method. Also, there is two-factor authentication, a master key and global settings lock that ensures you a maximized user security.

Kraken is available in the US, Japan, Canada and multiple countries in the European Union. There is also 47 market pairs with 7 base currencies including the Euro, Canadian Dollar and the US Dollar, Japanese Yen and British Pound.