Former Kraken Employee Sues The Crypto Exchange For Discrimination

A former Kraken employee now sues the cryptocurrency exchange after alleged harassment, discrimination, wrongful termination, and other accusations emerged by a whistleblower as we are about to find out more in the blockchain news below.

The popular US-based exchange Kraken is sued by a former Kraken employee Nathan Runyon who filed the lawsuit on November 26^th. Some of the accusations seem to be extremely serious including the disappearing of customers’ funds, stock option problems, and sanction violation. Runyon says that the company fired him because of those issues.

According to the summarized version of the lawsuit, the plaintiff started working at the crypto exchange as a financial analyst in March 2018 under the CFO Kaiser Ng. Just a few days later, Runyon received his first assignment from his boss where he had to ‘’come up with anything for the audit list that would satisfy the questions without regard to how accurate the info was.’’

Runyon noticed that Kraken operates in many countries that were sanctioned by the United States and found working with them to be illegal. After bringing up the subject a few times to the compliance officer at Kraken, he had to drop it as he saw no changes being made. A year after he started working for the company, Runyon received another task to reconcile with the customer account balances at Kraken along with the bank balances in several currencies. He noticed that the bank account at Kraken had millions of dollars less than the total customer funds that the exchange had to have in possession by now. After he talked to Ng about it, he was removed from the project.

Runyon was later working in a different section of the company where the employees can run their stock options and transfer shares. He noticed a few issues with the stock option grant vesting schedules and he went to talk to Ng but he was reputedly told there’s nothing they can do and to stop worrying about it. He got fired nine days after he spoke to Ng. While there are not official responses yet from the company, the lawsuit reads that the attorney of the company already signed a notice of acknowledgment which means that the lawsuit is still active.