Kraken review (2026)

Kraken is one of the oldest exchanges in the world — San Francisco, 2011 — and the one we recommend most often to Australians who have outgrown beginner apps. Kraken Pro brings real order types, deep liquidity and maker/taker fees from 0.25%/0.40% (falling with volume), while AUD deposits arrive free via PayID and Osko.

Its security reputation is the strongest in the industry: no major exchange hack in fourteen years of operation. Australians should know one blemish — ASIC took Kraken’s local operator Bit Trade to court over how a margin product was offered, ending in an A$8M penalty in December 2024. That was a product-compliance failure rather than a custody one, but it belongs in the picture.

On Kraken Pro you trade at 0.25%/0.40% maker/taker with no baked-in spread, and the fee falls further with 30-day volume. That makes a A$1,000 market order roughly a third of the cost of the same order on a typical AU retail app. Avoid the simple "Buy" widget in the consumer app, which charges convenience pricing like everyone else’s.

For context, the AU instant-buy average across our 13 tracked platforms is 0.76%. Worked example excludes network fees for on-chain withdrawals; estimates come from our verified fee data. See the full fee comparison or model your own trade in the profit calculator.

Kraken’s custody record is the industry benchmark — no major hack since 2011, a long-running bug bounty and proof-of-reserves audits. It is AUSTRAC-registered in Australia; the 2024 ASIC penalty against its local operator concerned a margin-lending product’s design and disclosure, not customer funds. As always with an offshore platform, AU support runs on global rails.

Every incident and regulatory action we track for Kraken, with primary sources — updated automatically from our fact database.