Kraken Files Confidential IPO After Valuation Falls to $13.3B

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi confirmed at a Washington, D.C. summit that the cryptocurrency exchange has filed confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. The company first submitted the filing around November 2025, shortly after raising $800 million at a $20 billion valuation.

Sethi confirmed the confidential filing remains active as Kraken monitors market conditions. The exchange paused public listing plans in March 2026 because of weak market sentiment and has not set a formal timetable for a public registration.

An April 2026 financing valued Kraken at $13.3 billion, roughly a 33% decline from its late-2025 peak. That round included a $200 million secondary share purchase by Deutsche Börse Group, which will hold about a 1.5% fully diluted stake once the transaction closes, expected in the second quarter of 2026. The investment builds on a strategic partnership announced in December 2025 focused on trading, custody and tokenized assets.

At the summit, Sethi described Kraken’s broader goal of making institutional-grade tools available to everyday traders and commented: “What they want at the end of the day is what Citadel and Jane Street have, or JPMorgan has, and they want it accessible to them. That’s our mission: How do we make all these products open?”

Kraken has taken steps consistent with that objective, including a $1.5 billion acquisition of NinjaTrader and securing direct Federal Reserve master account access earlier this year. Those developments, together with the Deutsche Börse arrangement, join a group of crypto firms pursuing public listings in 2026 as they expand services for retail and institutional customers.

The confidential filing preserves Kraken’s ability to proceed when market conditions improve while keeping detailed financial information private until a public registration is filed.

Coinbase, an industry peer that listed in 2021, marked its fifth anniversary as a public company and highlighted milestones including joining the S&P 500, serving as custodian for a large share of U.S. bitcoin and ether ETFs, developing the Base layer-2 network and supporting wider stablecoin use.