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Bitcoin Global News (BGN)

January 07, 2019 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- At this time, Kraken is still one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume that has its’ headquarters in the United States. Simultaneously, it sits at twenty-fourth place along the same indicators, globally.

Today however, CoinDesk released an article that expands upon certain statements that the exchange made over the weekend, which seemed to indicate that it is growing more and more frustrated with United States regulations. According to CoinDesk, Kraken received 475 subpoenas for internal data last year and 315 of them were from United States regulators. With those numbers in mind, it is easy to see why a crypto business might choose to block United States users from the outset. The sheer volume of bureaucratic requirements slow down anyone who wants to do business in the USA arena.

What may surprise many of you about these numbers is that only 29 of these requests were from the SEC and the CFTC, which quite clearly shows that they are not the most stringent regulators in existence. On the other hand, since the Homeland Security department and the FBI combined for close to 200 of these subpoenas, the answer to these growing requirements seems to lie in the area of law enforcement.

Kraken claims that at face value, these requests are not the issue. According to them, the true problem lies in how these agencies make their requests, with the subpoenas commonly coming with asks for petabytes of data at once, instead of simply access to data related to several suspicious accounts and transactions.

Considering all of this, it would seem that the end of Kraken’s United States business might be in sight. At the same time, since decisions like the SEC’s approval or rejection of the VanEck/SolidX ETF lie on the near horizon, it would be reasonable to expect the exchange to wait at least another quarter.

By: BGN Editorial Staff