Kraken, the second largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, has developed its own wallet, catching up with rival Coinbase in the product space and joining a saturated field that also includes big players like MetaMask, Ledger, and Trezor. I did.
new Voluntary storage The Kraken Wallet will be released on Wednesday and will be available to both Kraken users and non-users, CoinDesk first reported. 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, Kraken Wallet will be the first wallet to be open sourced by a major exchange. This means that developers can access and contribute to the code. Kraken also pays developers who discover vulnerabilities. Open source grant programso that we can improve the wallet if there are any bugs.
According to Kraken, the wallet collects “the absolute minimum amount of data to function as a wallet,” meeting the privacy principles that many cryptocurrency users value. “User activity is proxied through Kraken's own infrastructure, protecting IP addresses and preventing potential leakage of a user's personal identity and location.”
Coinbase's Coinbase Wallet is so popular that at least two other major crypto exchanges, Binance and OKX, offer wallets that allow users to connect to their ecosystems.
“For more than a decade, Kraken has been telling people to take control of their assets. We built Kraken Wallet on principles core to the cryptocurrency space, including user privacy and open source code. “We built it,” Eric Kuhn, product director at Kraken Wallet, told CoinDesk. “There are a lot of interesting things happening on-chain, and we needed a wallet that would allow people to access these ecosystems.”
Kraken has been building a suite of products over the past few months.
The collapse of Sam Bankman Fried's cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2022 highlighted the risks of leaving cryptocurrencies on centralized exchanges. This perhaps helps explain why companies like Kraken and Coinbase are eyeing business opportunities involving products on the blockchain.
“The Kraken Wallet is our way of investing in the “your keys, your crypto” ecosystem, where unauthorized financial access is essential to the existence of unauthorized financial access. While other wallets are welcome, we are open and will focus on building the best all-in-one crypto wallet. sources, secure and private,” Kuhn said.
