The CEO of Kraken, Jesse Powell, has confirmed that the company could go public with an IPO.
During an interview with FOX Business, Powell said Kraken is working to launch its IPO soon, but added that increasing regulations are a potentially worrying obstacle.
Kraken’s IPO by the end of 2021
Powell points out that US regulators have historically been among the strictest globally, and reveals that they are putting US companies at a disadvantage. Indeed, Kraken’s CEO says the company often has to deal with the SEC and CFDC, and that these agencies regularly ask them to take down products that they cannot get foreign competitors to take down.
In this regard he said:
“We may be forced out of the country by over-regulation, or by the enforcement guys not talking to the policy guys and not having, kind of, a national strategy on cryptocurrency”.
He did, however, confirm that the company is still looking to launch its public offering by the end of the year, specifically in the second half of 2021, but that is still to be decided.
Powell believes that the US could become dominant in the crypto market, but could also fall behind due to foreign competition that is less subject to such restrictions.
It is worth noting that the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, is not based in the US, and although it offers its services to Americans with a dedicated platform just for the US market, it actually finds fewer barriers to its evolution and expansion abroad.
In fact, Powell states that Kraken would also be considering moving to Tokyo, the UK or the UAE, where cryptocurrency regulations are very solid yet business-friendly. He also cited the new study by former CIA director Michael Morell, which highlighted that bitcoin is seldom used for illicit transactions, to warn the government that it should be more concerned about the possibility of the US being overtaken by China.
Today is the day of the listing of the other major US crypto exchange, Coinbase, and this trend of crypto companies becoming increasingly keen on becoming part of the mainstream financial market really does seem to suggest that the pioneering days of the Wild West are coming to an end for cryptocurrencies, and they are starting to become part of the system that until recently kept them at arm’s length.
