Kraken Returns with Free Trading

Kraken went down for over 48 hours for an "upgrade" and subsequent "rest" for its engineers.

Amidst screams for "Gox" and panic over the downtime which was only scheduled for a few hours Kraken staff worked to repair the platform and returned this morning.

“We are performing a system upgrade on Thursday, January 11 at approximately 5:00 UTC (Wednesday January 10 at 9 pm PT). Kraken services will be offline for about 2 hours during the upgrade, possibly longer.”

In an email to all users Kraken stated:

The Kraken website and trading is now back online, following the recent scheduled downtime necessary to upgrade our infrastructure. All client funds are safe and secure.

The update mentioned that no orders were on the books and all funds had been returned since all orders prior to the upgrade had been cancelled.

They've also paused margin liquidations for 24 hours and disabled withdraws for 12 hours (shocker there).

Deposits are also delayed, but there is a silver lining.

Until January 31st, Kraken is offering zero fee trades.

in appreciation for your loyalty to Kraken, we are activating zero fee trading for all clients (across non-margin trades) starting now and lasting through the end of this month.

Kraken offered an apology and explanation for the outage in addition to the zero fee trading.

We apologize for the uncertainty our downtime has caused. The scheduled downtime was to replace our old trading engine with a brand new trading engine - an improvement that customers have long asked for and that we have long been working hard on. We still have some more work to do before the new trading engine is as good as we want it to be, but this week’s replacement was an important first step to having a better trading experience. Our system is replicated in development, where all tests passed. However when the new engine was moved to the production environment, regression tests picked up a condition that proved quite difficult to track down. Further insight into the downtime and a description of actions we plan to take in order to improve the client experience will be provided via a retrospective Kraken blog post, to be published in the coming days.

Zero fee trading sucks less than the alternative and generous of Kraken so for now, perhaps we'll see a decline in the Gox accusations.

In the meantime ... zero fee trades ... get on it!

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