Kraken Debuts Krak Crypto and Fiat Payments App Across 110 Countries

Crypto exchange Kraken has debuted a peer-to-peer payments app to compete with the likes of CashApp and Vemno. 

The San Francisco, California-based company released Krak on Thursday, allowing users to send and receive payments in more than 300 currencies—including crypto—to over 110 countries. 

Kraken's main platform allows users to buy, sell and bet on the future price of hundreds of digital coins and tokens. 

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said that the app was built to compete with a financial system "stuck in the past." 

"With Krak, we're taking a bold step toward rebuilding what we consider to be the most important layer of the global economy: How people move and use money," he added. 

Kraken's new app supports all the fiat currencies and digital coins and tokens available on the exchange, and includes layer-2 scaling networks, such as Bitcoin's Lightning Network. Kraken's Global Head of Consumer Mark Greenberg told Decrypt that the app will have different use cases across countries.

"If you're in the United States—or if you're in Canada, like me—it's actually really hard to move money to friends in the United States, and I can use Krak to do that," he said. "If you're in Latin America, in a country with higher inflation, you may want to store your assets and U.S. dollar stablecoins and earn yield on those—you can do that with Krak. If you want to hold your payroll in Bitcoin and then eventually spend it on a card, you can do that."

He added that most deposits and many withdrawals were free on the app, and that the company was working to make them all free over time.

The exchange said in an announcement that sending payments using fiat money—U.S. dollars, pounds, or euros—would be done internally, without users needing to register a bank account. Clients instead have a username called a "Kraktag,"—similar to how payment apps like Cash App, WISE, and PayPal work. 

Users can also earn yield with Paxos' USDG stablecoin, the exchange added. 

The debut comes as Kraken, one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world, offers new products, including stocks and exchange-traded fund trading in certain U.S. states. 

Kraken also in March announced it was buying futures trading platform NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion. 

Kraken has been looking to expand as it emerges from regulatory headwinds. In March, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to drop a lawsuit against Kraken that alleged it was operating as a securities exchange. 

Sethi said at the time that while "traditional markets run on post-WWII, 1950s banking systems," today's acquisition was the beginning of Kraken's move to become an "institutional-grade trading platform where any asset can be traded, anytime."

The firm has confirmed to Decrypt that it is planning to go public.

Edited by James Rubin

Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to include comment from Kraken.