With the aim to offer the “best and most secure,” Kraken is a U.S. crypto exchange with competitive fees, advanced trading tools, and an admirable mix of coins. So, to learn more about it and what it offers, continue reading the article.

Kraken Overview

Founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell, based in San Francisco, CA, Kraken is one of the oldest and most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide. Since its launch in 2013, it has never been hacked, making it one of the most secure crypto trading platforms. Kraken offers its investors to deal in 50+ crypto coins along with seven fiat currencies. In addition to trading, it provides advanced features such as staking, margin, and futures trading, OTC desk, forex trading, and many more.

Types Of Trading And Order Types On Kraken

The platform offers instant options to beginners for buying/selling their assets on the exchange at the listed price. Other investors can trade on the market for buying or selling at a specified price. There are a lot of trading and order types provided by Kraken for everyone’s trading preferences. These are:

• Margin Trading: For experienced investors, Kraken allows margin trading to go long or short on a range of digital coins with up to 5x leverage.
• Futures Trading: The platform aims to offer diverse and dependable solutions for futures trading in cryptocurrencies. It provides regulated futures products with up to 50x leverage. 
• Forex Trading: With a minimum order limit of 10 units, you can perform forex trading on the Kraken cryptocurrency platform as well. There are around nine forex pairs available as of now. Fiat currencies can also be exchanged. 
• OTC: High-volume traders can benefit from Kraken’s Over The Counter (OTC) service for one on one service.
• Dark Pool: There is an invisible order book in the dark pool, which means a user can trade anonymously without showing his orders and interest to any other trader. 
• Staking: You can earn interest or staking rewards on your holdings (crypto as well as fiat currencies).

The platform offers a variety of order types too, that include the following:

• Limit Orders and stop-loss limit orders.
• Market Orders and stop-loss market orders.
• Take profit markets as well as limit orders.
• Bracket orders.
• Trigger orders.
• Maker only orders.
• Immediate or cancel order.
• Reduce only order.
• Editing existing orders.

You can find out more about all order types on Kraken’s Order types page.

Is Verification Required on Kraken?

To trade on Kraken, every user must verify their identity and go through the KYC (Know Your Customer) process. There are different levels of verification which are:

• Starter
• Express
• Intermediate
• Pro

You can find out the details of each verification level and their requirements here.

Kraken Fees

Kraken charges a trading fee on its platform. Maker and trader fees are as low as 0.16% for makers and 0.26% for takers. This can further be reduced to 0.00% for makers and 0.10% for takers, depending on the trading volume. Kraken categorizes trading fees under four heads:

• Regular trading fees.
• Stablecoin trading fees.
• Darkpool trading fees.
• Margin Trading fees.

Kraken Security Features

To offer a reliable and secure crypto exchange, Kraken implements:

• 2FA authentication along with Masterkey (Yubikey recommended) security.
• Universal 2^nd Factor (U2F) authentication.
• PGP/GPG encryption for emails.
• Global settings lock for protection of user’s info. from the third party.
• 95% of the digital assets are stored in cold storage with 24/7 surveillance.

Kraken Pros and Cons

Let us take a look at the pros and cons of Kraken:

Pros:

• Secure, well-established, and trusted since 2011.
• User-friendly interface.
• 27/7 live chat support.
• Several advanced features and tools.

Cons:

• Limited crypto assets
• Above-average trading fee

Final Words

With a plethora of advanced features, multiple currency support, high-level security, and customer support, Kraken is among the world’s most popular and trustworthy crypto exchanges. It is suitable for all kinds of investors, whether beginners, experienced, or institutional.