Kraken Rebuilds App Around AI Agent Trading
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- Kraken is preparing to reintroduce its app with agentic trading at its core, where AI agents continuously monitor markets, identify opportunities and execute trades in real time — but only after explicit user confirmation, making it "agentic, but not fully autonomous."
- Chief data officer Kamo Asatryan said the goal is to let everyday users respond to market conditions the way pro traders do, framing the AI as a "well-informed best friend" that knows the user's goals and risk tolerance.
- The onboarding experience uses AI to learn users' goals, risk tolerance, funding preferences and financial profile in a single flow, then builds a draft portfolio that users can review, adjust and approve with explanations behind each recommendation.
- Kraken, founded in 2011, currently counts institutions, trading firms, professional traders and active leverage traders as its core user base, and is now looking to bring online a new cohort as it "evolves beyond an exchange."
- The exchange is expanding into payments, banking and lending, betting that stablecoins and tokenized assets unlock use cases beyond crypto trading — with AI making those services "super accessible to everyone."
- Competitors Coinbase and Gemini have also recently introduced AI-assisted trading and developer tools, framing this push as an industry-wide shift happening during a prolonged crypto bear market.
- Asatryan pushed back on the bear-market-fad framing, arguing AI represents a "true growth opportunity" because Kraken's traders can take advantage of any price movement and stay engaged across market cycles, unlike traditional exchange customers who churn after FOMO-driven losses.
Why it matters: Kraken — whose core base is institutions and pro traders — is using AI agents to court retail users it has historically undersold, a cohort that could determine whether the exchange survives the bear market. By making the AI explicitly non-autonomous (user must confirm every trade), Kraken is sidestepping the regulatory landmine that fully autonomous trading would invite while still claiming the engagement and retention upside of agentic platforms.
