Bitcoin Exchange Kraken Acquires Coinsetter To Expand To The U.S.

By Romain DILLET for techcrunch,

According to Bitcoinity, Kraken is the largest EUR bitcoin exchange in the world with Bit-x and Gatecoin not far behind. But Kraken has one weakness — there isn’t much volume when it comes to other currencies. The company is trying to fix that by acquiring Coinsetter to expand to the U.S. and Canada — for real this time.

As a reminder, back in April 2015, Coinsetter acquired Cavirtex, a Canadian-based bitcoin exchange. Existing Coinsetter uses will get a Kraken account next week.

You might remember that Kraken already allows you to trade bitcoin with USD. But you had to transfer money to a Luxembourg-based account, incurring international transfer fees. And nobody was buying bitcoins with dollars on Kraken. To give you a bit of perspective, in the last 30 days, 97.8 percent of the exchange’s bitcoin transaction volume was made using EUR/bitcoin orders. Less than 2 percent were USD/bitcoin orders.

 Buying Coinsetter is just one part of the equation in order to add volume — even though Coinsetter was pretty tiny compared to large U.S.-based competitors. Kraken also needs to make it easier to deposit U.S. dollars on the platform. The company is partnering with SynapsePay to allow USD deposits in 37 U.S. states and Washington D.C. for just $5.

Finally, Kraken hasn’t applied for a BitLicense in the state of New York, so it can’t operate there. Let’s see whether the startup is going to change its mind and apply for a BitLicense in the coming months.