Kraken

It’s Friday and your Solana deposits are still working as usual. Earn a 3% deposit bonus when you fund your account. Only on Kraken.

The highlights, in one minute 👇 • Sponsoring Trump Accounts for Wyoming newborns • Payward acquires Magna • OTC desk connects to ICE Chat • Earn rewards on USDC See you next week. #krakenin60

While retail debates the dip, institutions are deploying capital. BlackRock. Harvard. Nomura. Strategy. Here’s what they did this week.

$25,000,000,000 in total xStocks transaction volume. In under 7 months since launch, xStocks has surpassed $25 billion in combined CEX, DEX, mint, and redemption volume — reinforcing its position as the largest provider and leading framework for tokenized equities globally. The milestone includes: • $3.5B+ in onchain activity • 80,000+ unique onchain holders • 8 of the top 11 tokenized equities by holders Tokenized equities are no longer experimental infrastructure. They are live markets with sustained liquidity, growing participation, and expanding global access. Fully backed 1:1 by underlying stocks and ETFs, and structured with licensed custodianship, xStocks are designed for long-term confidence and scale. This milestone signals something larger: capital markets are becoming more open, interoperable, and increasingly native to the internet. Read more about the milestone and what comes next: https://lnkd.in/e-wVvHK8

What does it take to launch a successful protocol? We hear this question from teams every week. Successful teams plan early for custody, token distribution, governance strategy and operational readiness well before their token generation event. Part 1 of our new Kraken 360 guide explores what protocol teams need to know for pre-TGE readiness. Read the guide: https://lnkd.in/eCMm9Q-v

Magna, now powered by Kraken ⬇️

Rust isn’t a trend for us. It’s the foundation of how we build systems powering the global adoption of crypto that can’t fail. Low latency, high integrity, and no shortcuts. We’ve been all in on Rust for over 7 years and built one of the largest enterprise Rust teams in the world. Our engineers are at Rust Nation UK this week exploring what’s next in performance-critical infrastructure and bleeding-edge financial products. If you’re building serious systems in Rust and care about correctness under pressure, we should talk. Start here 👉 https://lnkd.in/ers9t233

Over the last year, Stephanie Lemmerman and I spent a great deal of time discussing what Finance at Kraken needed to become as the company evolved. As Kraken, now Payward has grown into a multi product, global financial services platform, it became increasingly clear to me that Finance could not operate as a traditional reporting function. It needed to operate as a product and as a system. Not just something that produces statements, but something that produces real time truth, leverage, and control across the organization. When you build software, you do not optimize for heroic output. You design for determinism, latency, fault tolerance, and scale. The same should be true for financial operations. You do not patch the close process. You redesign the inputs. You do not explain variance after the fact. You build systems that surface it continuously and reduce the need for manual intervention over time. That shift in thinking was intentional and collaborative. Stephanie and I aligned early on the idea that Finance should move toward continuous visibility, automation by default, tighter integration with product and risk, and measurable reductions in manual reconciliation. We talked often about how to treat financial workflows the same way we treat customer facing systems, with clear ownership, defined service levels, explicit error tolerances, and a roadmap that compounds year over year. Part of Stephanie’s mission with us was helping build that foundation from the bottom up. That meant strengthening transparency, advancing our public reporting, supporting capital formation, and preparing the organization structurally for its next phase. For that work, I am genuinely thankful. She helped us get to where we are today. As the company continued to evolve, we mutually agreed that the next phase required a different operating structure. One that was more akin to the operating style we put into place in different parts of the organization and how we build products for our customers directly. Those decisions are never simple, but they are part of building a company for the long term rather than optimizing for comfort in the present. Stephanie remains a trusted advisor during this transition, and we value her continued support as we complete the handoff and build forward. Going ahead, David Ripley and I will continue building Finance the same way we build our financial operating stack for customers. From first principles. With automation as leverage, not cost cutting. With systems designed to eliminate redundant work and free people to operate at higher levels of judgment and impact. Many times, leadership transitions are reduced to headlines. I wanted to take a moment to recognize Stephanie directly for her work and for being a constructive, trusted partner and ally in helping us design what Finance needs to become. That work continues.

Your weekly signal from Kraken 📡 ☑️ Kraken 360 goes live ☑️ xStocks availability expands ☑️ Consensus Hong Kong presence ☑️ Largest lightning transaction in Bitcoin history #krakenin60

SOL ETFs slide, MegaETH goes live and Bernstein holds its $150K BTC target. Catch up on this week’s crypto news 👇