Kraken Launches Forex Trading for 9 Currency Pairs

The major US-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken launches Forex trading and goes live with nine new fiat currency pairs as of today, March 12. From 14:30 UTC, all of the users worldwide (excluding United States residents) will be able to use the Kraken platform and directly trade between Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, Japanese yen, British pounds and Swiss francs.

The exact FX pairs are as following: EUR/CAD, USD/CAD, USD/JPY, EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, EUR/USD, EUR/GBP, EUR/JPY, GBP/USD.

This is important in the cryptonews because once Kraken launches Forex trading, it will become the first major crypto exchange to make an entry in the forex market. Unlike its trading service for cryptocurrencies, the exchange is not offering margin trading on its forex offering at launch. However, it is setting what it claims are “industry low order minimums” which means that traders are only required to trade 10 units of base currency for each transaction.

The prices will be shown at five decimal points, except for JPY (Japanese Yen) pairs which will be displayed at 3 points. The exchange presented its move to provide Forex services as something that will help its clients be “more agile and sophisticated” in their trading strategies.

As you probably know from the altcoin news related to Kraken lately, the exchange has recently indicated its plans to expand services to the Indian market, following a recent ruling in the Supreme Court of the country to overturn existing restrictions on banking services to crypto firms.

This month, we also saw that the Kraken exchange became mired in a controversy involving the United Kingdom and its markets watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Still, as Kraken launches Forex trading now, we are seeing the focus shifted on this.

For those of you who did not follow the news back then, the FCA published a caution against the exchange on its cite, telling the public to be “especially wary of dealing with this unauthorized firm” but was later prompted to remove the warning after it transpired that the FCA’s tip-off had been connected with scammers who were falsely claiming to be operating under the Kraken brand and not the exchange itself.