As Bitcoin surges, crypto companies are jockeying for position.
Kraken, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, with $43 billion in assets and 2.5 million customers, is expanding into crypto derivatives in the U.S. in a bid to position itself as a full-service trading house and attract new smart money.
The Wyoming-based crypto exchange has actually been offering derivatives in Europe, where it claims to have over 35% market share, since 2019. The U.S. expansion comes amid growing appetite for these instruments and a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment under President Donald Trump.
It’s a “huge area of growth,” says Shannon Kurtas, Kraken’s Head of Exchange. He claims the company’s European derivatives business quadrupled from 2023 through 2024 and predicts the trend will continue. In the initial U.S. rollout, Kraken will offer CME-listed futures tied to major cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ether and solana. Clients can also expect contracts with diverse maturity dates (ranging anywhere from a few weeks to a few months) and competitive pricing of 0.5 basis points commission, says Kurtas.
The launch builds on Kraken’s $1.5 billion acquisition of NinjaTrader, a CFTC-registered retail futures platform serving 2 million clients globally, in March.
It also falls in line with the trend of both traditional and crypto firms integrating various asset classes. In April, Kraken launched commission-free equities trading in the U.S., incorporating over 11,000 U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs. Just last month, Robinhood completed its $200 million acquisition of one of the world’s longest running crypto exchanges Bitstamp, based in Luxembourg. In May, Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., announced the purchase of Dubai-based Deribit for $2.9 billion, marking its foray into the crypto options market. All three firms are in various stages of developing their tokenized equities business.
“There are a lot of benefits ranging from capital efficiency to simplicity and operational ease for creating multiple asset classes [accessible] through a single broker or platform,” says Kurtas. “And certainly, these are goals of ours for our clients.”