Kraken

Kraken has been running since 2011, which makes it one of a very small number of exchanges that has been through every crypto cycle since and is still here. Over that time it has not lost customer funds to a breach. That is worth stating plainly and worth stating carefully: it is a track record, not a guarantee, and the sentence is about what has happened rather than what cannot.

It is one of the few exchanges that lets you check its reserves yourself. Kraken publishes periodic proof-of-reserves attestations built on a Merkle tree, which means you can verify that your own balance was included in the total that was audited, rather than taking an aggregate on faith. Almost nobody else in this industry offers that. The limitation matters as much as the feature, though: proof of reserves demonstrates assets, not liabilities. It shows the exchange holds what it says it holds; it cannot show what the exchange owes elsewhere, and an exchange can pass a reserves audit and still be insolvent. Treat it as one strong signal rather than a clean bill of health.

Its regulatory history is worth knowing and easy to misread. In February 2023 Kraken paid $30 million and shut down its US staking-as-a-service programme after the SEC treated it as an unregistered securities offering. In November 2023 the SEC sued again, alleging Kraken operated as an unregistered exchange; that case was dismissed with prejudice in March 2025 with no penalty and no admission of wrongdoing, as part of a broader change in how the agency approached the whole sector. The honest reading is that the second case ended because the regulatory weather changed, not because a court examined the allegations and cleared them. Neither the charge nor the dismissal tells you much about whether your coins are safe there.

Buy on Kraken Pro, not on the instant-buy screen. The simple purchase flow charges a markup that a market order on Pro does not, and on small amounts the difference is a large fraction of what you are spending. It is the same account and the same balance. This is the single easiest cost to avoid on the entire platform and it is avoided by clicking a different link.

Support is the recurring complaint, and it is the kind that only bites at the worst moment. Day to day it does not matter. It matters a great deal on the day a withdrawal is stuck, an account is locked during a verification review, or you need a human while a price is moving. Assume slow, and do not keep anything on the exchange that you would need to move urgently.

The keys are theirs. A balance on Kraken is a claim on Kraken, and the reserves attestations are a reason to think that claim is well backed rather than a reason to think it is not a claim. For anything you are holding rather than trading, take it off the exchange. Nobody from Kraken will ever ask for your seed phrase or ask you to move funds to a wallet they name.