Yes

Kraken is based in SF and has various US regulatory attachments and thus auditing obligations. It is specifically not an offshore operation. It’s also been around for a long time.

Among crypto exchanges Kraken is definitely on the legitimate side of the spectrum.

Somebody should create a kind of credit rating for exchanges to rate their risk and legitimacy.

And a week ago you would have said this about FTX.US, no?

FTX has always been a bit of a joke in the crypto community. I elaborated in a previous comment.

Kraken has been a bastion of sanity amidst the chaos for a decade now. No prop trading, no dizzying corporate structure, no "liquidity" issues, no stadium sponsorships. They're just chugging along in the background, keeping their site online, publishing regular audits, and running the business like adults. I intend on holding BTC indefinitely, but if anything happened to Kraken it would likely change my mind.

Exactly this. They take security and custody seriously and I've been holding BTC (and moving to cold wallet) for years now.

FTX was only a few years old and offered 8% interest on all deposits under $10k. I told my friends that if they use them be ready to pull their money at a moment's notice. That's what I did as soon as the Coindesk article came out about Alameda's balance sheet. I knew it was high risk so I kept about a quarter of my crypto holdings on there and had my Ledger addresses whitelisted.

FTX.us was a separate entity but still owned by the offshore entity and thus got included in the bankruptcy so no i wouldn’t have said the same. Add i understand it was still operating after the main site went down because it was separate but customer funds in crypto exchanges still aren’t protected like with banks. So don’t use an exchange that is in any way attached to unregulated offshore activities.

My dad pitched me this rating system months ago, I advised that it would be fairly game-able, my big points were that 1) look how easy it is to game reviews on almost any site, amazon, glassdoor, etc. 2) any enforceable credit system needs actual teeth, the reason that credit scores are useful to institutions is that there is the direct ability to reduce someones quality of life significantly using them, e.g. bad loans, can't get an apartment, etc. to me 2 seems to be the main reason a startup credit score rating doesn't work

Kraken regularly publishes proof of reserves. I don't recommend keeping funds on exchanges as a rule, but I don't feel stressed out leaving a percentage of my holdings there for an extended duration.

Do they publish proof of liabilities too?

I believe only Coinbase publishes total liabilities at the moment. In my opinion, Coinbase is the gold standard due to being a publicly traded company and Kraken carries more risk.

Insofar as each client's deposits? Yes.

>Any client can independently verify that their balance was included in the Proof of Reserves audit by comparing select pieces of data with the Merkle root.

https://www.kraken.com/proof-of-reserves

No

I mean we all know who the hacker is lol

It is kind of strange how unsophisticated the hack ended up being. I feel like SBF would have pulled off something with a bit more finesse.

From a thousand miles up, most of crypto looks like script kiddies piggy backing a couple of brilliant programmers.