Tech
Kraken Launches Its Own Crypto Wallet, Joining Competition from Coinbase and MetaMask
Kraken, the second-largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, has developed its own wallet, catching up with rival Coinbase in the product arena and joining a saturated industry that also includes major players like MetaMask, Ledger, and Trezor.
The new self-guardian “Kraken Wallet” will be released on Wednesday and will be available to both Kraken users and non-users, CoinDesk first reported. Initially, the wallet will support eight blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Dogecoin.
According to a blog post shared with CoinDesk, the Kraken Wallet will be the first from a major exchange to be open source. This means developers can access and contribute to the code. Kraken will also pay developers who find vulnerabilities through their open source grant programso that they can improve the wallets in case there are any bugs.
The wallet will collect the “absolute minimum amount of data to function as a wallet,” according to Kraken, ticking off a privacy tenet cherished by many cryptocurrency users. “User activity is proxied through Kraken’s infrastructure, shielding IP addresses and preventing user identity and location information from potentially being exposed externally.”
Coinbase’s Coinbase wallet is extremely popular, and at least two other major cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance and OKX, offer wallets that users can connect to their ecosystems.
“Kraken has been telling people to self-custody their assets for over a decade. We built Kraken Wallet on the core tenets of the crypto space, like user privacy and open source code,” Eric Kuhn, Kraken Wallet’s product director, told CoinDesk. “There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening on-chain, and we wanted a wallet that would allow people to go and access those ecosystems.”
In recent months Kraken has expanded its product range.
The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange in 2022 highlighted the risks of leaving cryptocurrencies on centralized exchanges, perhaps helping to explain why companies like Kraken and Coinbase have been dabbling in business opportunities involving blockchain-based products.
“Kraken Wallet is our way of investing in the ‘your keys, your crypto’ ecosystem that is central to the existence of permissionless financial access. We welcome other wallets, but will focus on building the best all-in-one crypto wallet that is open source, secure, and private,” Kuhn said.