Topic: [ANN] KRAKEN.COM - US-based Exchange w/ Margin Trading - OPEN BETA - page 6. (Read 14346 times)

Beta testing!

They do have an API, but no official docs yet.  Here's some unofficial documentation that they sent me last week.  Note that this isn't final and also doesn't cover any of the trading functions.  Should give you some idea of how it will work though (similar to Gox and other exchanges out there now)

What's your status on an API for trading and market data?
I assume it will be available eventually, but you should release it as soon as possible to give developmers of trading utilities and bots a headstart, so they can use the beta site to test their own tools/products and have them ready when you go into production.

Watching.

Hi Kraken guys,



I have another idea. One that might not sit too well with everyone, but considering the recent events of buy and sell walling, I think it might be a good one:

And order cancellation fee of 10% of the usual fee. On other exchanges you see sometimes people deliberately manipulating the markets. And your exchange needs something that is absolutely different and a game changer. And that would be cancellation fees.

IN my bank's stock order book I pay similarly a fee for setting an order that is also being paid if i recall the order. And with this setup, you would create stability in a sea of insanity. Don't make it too big. Bring it to 10%. You don't want little investors to notice it, but deliberatley manipulating wall moving people should know what is coming to them.-

man... you guys are sending the wolf???  shieeeeeeeet,  that's all you had to say.

for real though, please tell me this new exchange (and others like it) are coming to save us from this ridiculous situation we are in,  definitely going to check it out.

Thanks!  Given Dwolla's history of screwing over Bitcoin exchanges, like our friends at TradeHill, we won't be supporting them.  We'll announce our banking partner at the time we open the site up for real deposits.



Most definitely.  A small percentage of the funds are kept in a hot wallet for withdrawals but the vast majority are kept in cold storage, offline.


1.  We don't have enough (any) experience here to give solid numbers.  It's going to depend on our daily withdrawal requirements.  My feeling is that if you need to withdraw a lot of BTC at once, you can probably wait a bit so it's better to sacrifice a little convenience for better security and only keep what is likely to be necessary in the hot wallet.

2.  Yes, all new deposits go directly to cold storage, for exactly that reason.

3.  Yes, cold storage is completely offline.



4.  Yes, Kraken maintains full reserves.  Customer funds reside in a bank account separate from our operations account and fees are pulled across on a daily basis.  Payward does not borrow customer funds for operations and we do not lend customer funds, even for margin trading within our own exchange.  Funds offered for margin are acquired from other sources.

5.  At the moment, backups are onsite but unless a meteor destroys the data center, we should be ok.  We'll expand to offsite shortly.  Data is replicated in real time and backed up on a daily basis.  If only the primary account database were lost, everything would still be available in backups.

6.  Good questions.  We just had a chat about this so please do not take this as the final word but here's what we're thinking:

A USD value would be assigned to all the losses and remaining balances.  All deposited funds are of equal standing up to a cap and beyond the cap are distributed pro rata.  So, if the cap were $100k and we had 10 users, 9 of which had $50k balances and 1 of which had a $1m balance ($1,450,000 total) and we lost $600k ($850k left), 9 guys would receive their $50k back and 1 guy would receive $400k back.  If you want to keep some exorbitant amount of money on the exchange, you take the risk or maybe we can find a way to insure it (which we have not had luck with so far).  This is if we are actually legally able to decide.  It may very well be that all funds must be redistributed pro rata without any sort of cap.  It may also be that funds held as USD have some extra legal protections that BTC do not.  More research and consideration is required.  We'd like to hear community thoughts on this matter.

As far as we understand, according to law and without the need to specify this (though we can to make our position clear), depositors would have preference over ordinary business debt.  You have given us your money to hold for safe keeping on your behalf and that money never touches our operations account, which should be the only account up for grabs by non-depositor creditors--it's not our money to take.  If for any reason Payward ever has less than full reserves, it should immediately transfer money from its operations account, even liquidate assets in order to return to full reserves.  The question is what happens in some catastrophic hack where even after liquidating all the company's assets we are still not able to make the depositors whole and we also have some other business debt.  The depositors would receive everything and the other creditors would be out of luck.



I hope you'll understand that we don't want to give too much away here.  If an intruder breaches our security, it'd be better for us (and you) if they did not know what to expect.

We've spent over $150k on our own hardware.  Our servers reside in locked racks in a private cage in an expensive top tier data center with armed guards, retina scans, video surveillance, etc.
Staff have all been thoroughly reviewed and for anything dangerous, multiple signatures are required.
Data is encrypted wherever possible and systems are both redundant and isolated from each other such that if someone were to gain access to one machine, they would likely not gain anything useful.
Customer service and verification systems are modeled somewhat after PCI compliance standards.  The office is wired on separate networks for separate purposes.  The systems that agents access your uploaded verification docs on cannot do anything but access those docs.  They'd use a different system for answering tickets.
The user interface takes better security over better UX in many instances, not giving you any error messages that might allow you to find accounts, emails, etc.
Two factor authentication is available with more advanced security features to come.
The API allows for two-factor on keys and quite granular permissions.

Please do, interface looks awesome, name is geeky funny, everything else looks professional, based in western country.

Shut up and take my fees.

I got a chance to play around with the beta a week or so ago.  I agree that this looks very promising.

I seem to remember seeing a "Dwolla" option in the dummy withdrawal page, so I'm guessing they will be launching with Dwolla support (or are planning to have it at some point).

You're on the motherfucker...? 

ETA: heeey, that's pretty slick.

In light of recent events, we just wanted you guys to know that we’re on the motherfucker.  Go back in there, chill out and wait for the cavalry which should be coming directly:  https://beta.kraken.com

Target launch for real trading is mid next week.  Beta accounts are auto-funded with funny money and will be wiped at launch.  Actual deposits/withdrawals are disabled.  Address support issues to beta-support@