Kraken Rebukes New York AG for Malicious Report

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken’s Chief Executive Officer Jesse Powell has publically rebuked New York’s Attorney General Barbara Underwood for what he called her “malicious” report about the cryptocurrency industry. He also called the AG an “abusive ex” who just could not accept that you had moved on.

Request for Information Denied

The entire saga started earlier this year, when the New York Attorney General’s Officer requested 13 cryptocurrency exchanges to provide details about their operations, controls as well as security measures against malicious attacks.

Of these 13, 9 participated, however, the other 4, including Kraken, stated that they did not trade in New York and so declined to provide the information that the AG’s Office had demanded.

Underwood’s report is based on the information that was garnered from these 9 cryptocurrency exchanges. However, her report seemed rather biased against Kraken as well as Coinbase.

The report mentioned multiple times that Kraken had “refused” to provide information, indicating that the crypto exchange had something to hide, including illegally offering exchange services to New York residents in violation of the law. Cryptocurrency exchanges in New York cannot operate without the BitLicense, which Kraken does not have.

Kraken responded to these allegations by stating that this report was highly malicious as well as unprofessional, and that these misdeeds were implied only because the exchange had refused to give the AG’s Officer the information it wanted. Kraken stated that they did not operate in New York at all, and that their entire operations were completely compliant with all laws.

Despite the fact that there were a total of 4 cryptocurrency exchanges (Binance, Huobi, Kraken and Gate.io) that did not provide information to the AG’s Office, Underwood’s report singled out Kraken’s refusal as “alarming”.

According to the report, Kraken’s public response has been “alarming”. By not participating, the report stated that Kraken was declaring that market manipulation did not matter to traders, even though scams were rampant in the crypto industry.

Escalating Dispute

Kraken is not the only cryptocurrency exchange that is at odds with the New York Attorney General and her Office. Coinbase has been critical of this report to, taking Underwood to task on a blog post. In that post, Coinbase refuted claims made by this report that 20% of the cryptocurrency’s trading volume came from its own staff. Coinbase called these figure “misreported”.

Coinbase was not the only responder to Underwood’s report. Even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also criticized the report, saying that it was trying to try Kraken’s case in “the court of public opinion”.