Multiple customer emails shared indicate that Kraken will suspend all Tether USDT,DAI, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Wrapped Ether (WET), and Wrapped Axelar (WAXL) transactions in Canada in November and December.
In response to a request for comment, a Kraken spokesperson said, “We constantly monitor the assets on our platform to ensure we are meeting the highest compliance standards in the crypto industry,” before confirming the suspensions.
“In accordance with recent Canadian regulatory changes and following extensive consultation with the CSA and OSC, we today notified our clients that we will soon be suspending trading for USDT, DAI, WBTC, WETH, and WAXL.”
Kraken is still “committed to providing our Canadian clients with an exceptional trading experience,” the email continued.Many Canadian cryptocurrency users may not be surprised by the suspensions because they follow several other prominent exchanges that implemented comparable measures in 2023.Coinbase stopped trading USDT, DAI, and RAI in August, imitating Crypto.com, which had already delisted USDT.Some companies may have completely withdrawn from the Canadian market as a result of the same regulatory difficulties that those companies encountered.OKX stopped operating in Canada in June, as Cointelegraph reported, following Binance’s announcement in May that it would do so.
For its part, Kraken only plans to halt transactions pertaining to five particular assets while seemingly carrying on with business as usual in Canada.Deposits and trading activities for the aforementioned assets will stop “as of November 30th,” the email claims.Following that, users won’t be able to withdraw the linked assets “as of December 4th.”Lastly, the email states that “as of December 5th,” any leftover linked assets will be credited to users’ accounts and converted to US dollars at the “prevailing market rate.”
In related news, Kraken said on October 27 that a new managing director for U.K. operations has been appointed.Bivu Das, the new director, has extensive experience in both traditional and fintech financial services. He was previously the head of Starling Bank and an entrepreneur.