Exchange giants Kraken announced that they will be listing Algorand on their platform. This has caused quite a stir in the Algorand community since getting listed on a high-profile exchange is an extremely positive development. Before this, the ALGO tokens were listed on Coinbase and Binance.US in September and October, respectively.
Regarding the listing, Kraken announced:
Kraken will enable deposits and withdrawals for ALGO at approximately 14:30 UTC on January 22. The first trades will start shortly after funding is enabled as sell orders cannot be placed until deposits clear. The initial trading minimum will be 50 ALGO.
Trading for USD, EUR, BTC and ETH pairs will begin once ALGO deposits have cleared, which should be around 45 seconds after deposits are enabled. Notable investors like Union Square Ventures have already purchased ALGO tokens in advance.
What is Algorand?
Algorand is helmed by Turing award winner Silvio Micali and is considered one of the most promising projects in the cryptospace. Algorand is building the world’s first open, permissionless, a pure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. Algorand’s scalable ecosystem has attracted a lot of institutional attention. It has partnered with IDEX, the #1 decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum, AssetBlock, Reach, DUST Identity, and World Chess. They also made a lot of waves by launching Algorand Smart Contracts (ASC) and being one of the few projects in the crypto space that’s entirely Sharia-compliant.
What is Kraken?
Following the catastrophic Mt Gox hack of 2011, Jesse Powell decided to work on a new exchange that could function as a proper replacement. This new exchange was called “Kraken,” and it was launched two years later in September 2013. Initially, they only offered Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Euro trades. Currently, they offer more than 50 trading pairs and also provide price information to the Bloomberg Terminal.
Popular exchange IDEX is also collaborating with Algorand in a bid to develop its next version of the Exchange. It has been six months since Algorand’s POS blockchain went live back in June, 2019, today, ALGO is now listing on a handful of marketplaces such as Binance, CoinBasePRO, Huobi and several more since its inception.