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.
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.
