Kraken Looks To Join The NFT Bandwagon, Enables NFTs Collateral

Kraken looks to join the NFT bandwagon as it aims to provide new types of services to a marketplace of its own. In our latest crypto news today, we are reading more about it.

The CEO and founder of US exchange Kraken, Jesse Powell, explained that Kraken looks to join the NFT bandwagon by launching an NFT marketplace but said he will have new features like allowing customers to use their digital collection as collateral to borrow funds. Powell outlined the company’s plans in an interview with Bloomberg, saying that 2021 will go down in history as the year of NFTs. The craze for these collections exploded outside of the crypto industry with many artists, sportsmen, and politicians issuing some form of digital art.

The surging demand led to countless crypto companies developing their own NFT marketplaces and Kraken now aims to be the last one to join. Powell asserted that it will be more than just a platform for selling, buying, and holding digital art. Powell noted:

“If you deposit a CryptoPunk on Kraken, we want to be able to reflect the value of that in your account. And if you want to borrow funds against that.”

Kraken’s CEO expects NFTs to outgrow the phases of speculation in the next few years and said that “phase two is buying art and supporting artists, phase three will be functional uses of NFTs.” Powell touched upon the listings of the meme coin SHIB on Kraken and said that these additions are possible after enhancing the demand from users or if someone like Elon Musk starts tweeting about something like he does with DOGE. He concluded:

“There’s not incredibly interesting new technology there or anything; it’s just largely community-driven interest. It’s basically a memecoin that has the community’s attention, and sometimes you have to just list those.”

As recently reported, Kraken is stepping up its game especially after a successful year it had, now the US exchange decided to close 2021 with the acquisition of Staked and expanded its token staking capabilities, and generally improved the quality of the service. Staked is a non-custodial crypto staking platform that facilitates the secure storage of the assets while providing attractive yield options for investors.