Kraken, the second-biggest U.S.-based crypto exchange, has developed its own wallet, catching up to its rival Coinbase in the product arena and joining a saturated field that also includes major players like MetaMask, Ledger and Trezor.
The new self-custodial “Kraken Wallet” is being releasing Wednesday and will be available to both Kraken users and non-users, CoinDesk is first to report. The wallet will initially support eight blockchains including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and Dogecoin.
According to a blog post shared with CoinDesk, the Kraken Wallet will be the first from a major exchange to be open-sourced. This means that developers can access and contribute to the code. Kraken will also pay developers that find vulnerabilities through their open-source grant program, so that they can improve the wallets in the event that there are bugs.
The wallet will collect the “absolute minimum amount of data to function as a wallet,” according to Kraken, ticking off a privacy principle that is valued by many crypto users. “User activity is proxied through Kraken’s own infrastructure, shielding IP addresses and preventing users’ identity and location information from potential external exposure.”
Coinbase’s Coinbase Wallet is extremely popular, and at least two other big crypto exchanges, Binance and OKX, offer wallets for users to plug into their ecosystems.
“Kraken has been telling people for more than ten years to self-custody their assets. We built Kraken Wallet on the principles central to the crypto space, such as user privacy and open source code,” said Eric Kuhn, the Product Director for Kraken Wallet to CoinDesk. “There’s a lot of interesting things that are happening on-chain and we wanted a wallet that enables people to go and access these ecosystems.”
Kraken has been building out its suite of products over the last few months.
In November, Kraken was reportedly talking with multiple layer 2 teams about building their own layer 2 blockchain – shortly after Coinbase came out with its own rollup chain, Base, in August.
The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange in 2022 underscored the risks of leaving crypto on centralized exchanges – possibly helping to explain why the likes of Kraken and Coinbase have been nosing into business opportunities involving on-blockchain products.
“Kraken Wallet is how we invest in the “your keys, your crypto” ecosystem which is vital for the existence of permissionless financial access. We welcome other wallets but we are going to focus on building the best all in one crypto wallet that is open source, secure and private,” Kuhn said.
Read more: Kraken Said to Seek Partner to Help Build It a Layer 2 Blockchain Network