Former Kraken Employee Sues Exchange For $900k+ Because Of Unpaid Salaries

The United States based crypto exchange Kraken is under a lot of pressure recently. According to the latest cryptocurrency news, a former employee of the firm is suing the exchange for over $900,000 claiming that it failed to pay him for his work there.

The news was first reported by Bloomberg on April 7. The portal featured Jonathan Silverman who reportedly joined the exchange in April 2017 in order to manage institutional sales and its trading desk in New York. According to the claims, he reached an oral agreement with the exchange founder Jesse Powell to receive a $150,000 salary as well as 10% commission of the trading desk’s annual work.

In the lawsuit filed in New York on April 4, Silverman claims that the trading desk took in more than $19 million in profits during the three months in 2017, but that he received neither the commission nor the promised additional stock options.

Bloomberg also noted that a Kraken spokesperson, Christina Vee, said that Silverman is “both lying and in breach of his confidentiality agreement.”

Meanwhile, Silverman’s figure aligns with similar failure-to-pay claims made in a separate lawsuit from the one-time Kraken employee Robert Adler who has alleged the New York trading desk made $19 million in profit between the month of September and the end of 2017.

After leaving the firm, Silverman claims that he reached an agreement with the Bitcoin exchange Kraken in which he would be paid $907,631 as a lump sum settlement. The platform has refused to make the payment, according to his lawsuit.

“Misrepresenting to the public and government regulators that it was not operating in New York; when in reality, Kraken’s OTC practice, and OTC trading (including logging into the Kraken exchange and negotiating wire transfers) occurred almost exclusively in New York,” the lawsuit notes.

Bloomberg also reported that Silverman was one of the two allegedly employed at Kraken’s New York trading office.

As previously reported, the exchange Kraken ceased offering services to NY residents in 2015, calling the state’s crypto regulatory regime under the stringent BitLicense “a creature so foul, so cruel that not even Kraken possesses the courage or strength to face its nasty, big, pointy teeth.”