Kraken

On the one question you can actually verify — does the exchange hold what it owes you — Kraken is the strongest venue we measured. Its proof of reserves covers total client liabilities rather than only assets, it is attested quarterly by a named accounting firm, and every client can pull a personal Merkle proof confirming their own balance sits inside the attested total.

That last detail is what separates a proof from a claim. Publishing a wallet address shows you hold something; showing liabilities and letting each client verify their own line shows you hold enough. Kraken’s own position is that anything less is not a full proof of reserves, and on our reading of the category it is right. Latest snapshot at the time of writing is 31 March 2026. For contrast, one venue in the same rating produced a reserve-ratio table that rendered “No data found” when we opened it, and Coinbase — larger than Kraken — publishes no proof of reserves at all.

Since March 2026 there is a second, stronger layer on the fiat side. Kraken Financial is a Wyoming special purpose depository institution operating on a full-reserve basis, holding liquid assets of at least 100% of client fiat deposits, and it now holds a Federal Reserve master account. Client dollars therefore sit in a full-reserve state-chartered bank with direct access to Fed payment rails, which is a materially different proposition from fiat held in an offshore exchange’s operating account.

The gap is insurance, and Kraken does not hide it. There is no protection fund and no deposit insurance on the crypto side, and its support pages say so directly — crypto exchanges do not qualify. We treat that as an absence rather than a deception, and it remains an absence: if client crypto were taken, there is no fund to claim against. Set against it, we found no documented hack of client crypto in fifteen years of operating, a record only a handful of venues can claim.

So the honest framing is that Kraken substitutes provability for compensation. You can check the money is there; you have no fund to claim from if it stops being there. On the evidence of how self-asserted protection funds have actually performed — including one being tested right now — we think that is the better half of the trade.

Kraken is cheaper and deeper; Coinbase is more regulated and publishes no proof of reserves. On our 14 July 2026 run, a $10,000 bitcoin buy cost 0.26% on Kraken and 0.60% on Coinbase — Coinbase is 2.3 times more expensive for the identical order.

The order books are further apart than the fees. We measured 189.8 BTC of depth within 0.1% of best ask on Kraken against 28.2 BTC on Coinbase: Kraken’s book is roughly 6.7 times deeper at the level that decides whether a large order moves the price. At $100,000 Kraken’s effective cost was 0.261% against Coinbase’s 0.604%. Coinbase wins one measurement — API response latency of 183 ms against Kraken’s 224 ms — which matters to a bot and to nobody else.

On custody the two hold opposite kinds of evidence, and this is the real decision. Kraken gives you a quarterly attested proof covering liabilities that you can check yourself. Coinbase gives you none: no Merkle tree, no published reserve addresses, no way to verify your balance is backed. What it offers instead is a Nasdaq listing, annual audits by a major firm and SEC filings — an audited balance sheet rather than a proof you can run.

Coinbase’s own filings are the strongest argument against it. Its annual report warns that total customer assets are substantially more than its corporate assets and available insurance, and it carries a standing risk factor stating that in bankruptcy custodially held crypto could be drawn into the estate and customers treated as general unsecured creditors. Coinbase wrote that sentence about itself. Kraken, meanwhile, holds a Federal Reserve master account and a full-reserve bank charter that Coinbase does not.

We score Kraken 7.8 and rate its custody 9 out of 10 against Coinbase’s 8, and its cost 5 against Coinbase’s 2. The case for Coinbase is a listed, audited, US-regulated counterparty and the best onboarding in the category; the case for Kraken is that it costs less than half as much, holds a deeper book, and lets you verify the reserves yourself. If you are choosing on price or provability, Kraken. If you want an SEC-reporting public company and will pay 34 basis points for it, Coinbase.

Against the other venues people compare it with: Binance and Bitget both charge 0.10%, so Kraken is 2.6 times their price, and neither has Kraken’s custody evidence — Bitget has $351.6m missing and withdrawals suspended as we publish. Gemini and Crypto.com sit closer to Coinbase on cost than to Kraken.

A $10,000 bitcoin buy cost 0.26% when we priced it on 14 July 2026 — the published taker fee, with measured slippage of effectively zero against best ask. On this venue the fee really is the whole bill at retail size, which is not true everywhere.

We measure cost rather than read it off a fee page because the fee page is only part of it. The full cost of a trade is fee plus spread plus slippage, and a venue advertising 0.1% can cost more than one advertising 0.26% if its book is thin. Kraken’s is not: 189.8 BTC of depth within 0.1% of best ask, 471.9 BTC within 0.5%, and a BTC/USD spread of 0.0002%. Even at $100,000 the effective cost only moved to 0.261%.

There are two fee schedules and people conflate them. The simple buy-and-sell interface charges considerably more than Kraken Pro, which is the order-book venue our 0.26% figure comes from — same company, same custody, materially different price. Anyone comparing Kraken against another exchange on the instant-buy screen is comparing the wrong number.

Withdrawals are where Kraken is unusually strong, and this is the part fee comparisons routinely miss. On fiat, ACH, domestic wire and SWIFT are documented as free on the USD side and SEPA is free on the EUR side, with GBP, CAD, AUD and CHF supported and their fees published. Many venues that beat Kraken on trading fees claw it back on the way out; a cheap trade at a venue charging $25 to wire your money home is not cheap.

The conclusion is still that Kraken is expensive to trade on. Binance and Bitget charge 0.10% with enough depth that the gap survives contact with a real order. On a single purchase 16 basis points is trivial; for someone trading weekly it is the largest recurring cost of the venue, and no retail volume tier closes it.

In March 2026 Kraken Financial became the first digital asset bank in US history to receive a Federal Reserve master account, letting it connect directly to Fedwire and other Fed payment rails. The approval is a 12-month pilot limited account, not a permanent grant, and that distinction is the whole story.

The Fed classified Kraken Financial as a Tier 3 applicant — eligible, not federally insured, and therefore subject to heightened scrutiny — and it is only the third such applicant ever approved. Direct rail access is a capability that has historically belonged to insured banks. Kraken reaches it through a Wyoming special purpose depository institution charter that requires full reserves: liquid assets of at least 100% of client fiat deposits, with no lending against them.

What it means practically is that dollar movements no longer depend on a correspondent bank willing to serve a crypto company. The de-banking risk that has repeatedly stranded exchange customers — a partner bank exits, fiat withdrawals stop — is the risk this removes, and it is the one that has actually hurt people. It also puts a federal supervisor in the room alongside the Wyoming regulator.

Two cautions. It is a pilot with a one-year term, so it can lapse or be renewed on conditions, and it covers Kraken Financial’s banking activity rather than blessing the exchange’s crypto custody — the absence of crypto insurance is unchanged. What it does is make Kraken the most consequential live test of whether the SPDI model works, and the answer matters well beyond this one company.

Kraken serves the United States nationally except Maine and New York, with product-level restrictions in several other states, and it does so under its main brand rather than a separate US entity. That is unusual: most large offshore venues either exclude Americans entirely or run a walled-off US platform with a shorter asset list and different fees.

In Europe it holds a MiCA CASP authorisation through Payward Europe Solutions Ltd, granted by the Central Bank of Ireland and passported across the EEA — with MiCA in force, that is the difference between a venue that can serve EU residents and one winding down. In the UK, Payward Ltd is an FCA-registered cryptoasset firm, FRN 928768. It also holds permissions from FINTRAC, AUSTRAC and the Bermuda Monetary Authority.

The asset list is deliberately shorter than rivals’. Kraken lists conservatively, so the token you want may be missing — and you are correspondingly less likely to hold something that gets delisted or is later found to be an unregistered security. For most people that is a feature being presented as a limitation.