Watch CNBC's full interview with Kraken CEO Dave Ripley at Bitcoin 2025

Well, a number of things. First, thanks for having me here. We've had a number of meetings so far this trip. On the policy side, absolutely, we have big and great things hopefully happening on the US policy side with a number of bills that we want to get done in the very near future. The president said he's ready to sign these bills. We got to get them through Congress and hopefully signed by August is the target. On the flip side, I've also had conversations with a number of financial institutions, substantially traditional financial services institutions that are looking to get into crypto, and we're having a lot of discussions with them on how we can help them pull that off.

Yeah, you know, I have heard about that one. I don't know how big of a sticking point that particular term is, but you're right. We got two bills. We have the stablecoin bill and what's called the market structure bill, which is a bigger, broader bill. Basically regulates companies like Kraken in the broader crypto ecosystem. We're looking to get both of them done in August. Senator Hagerty is leading the charge with the Genius Act, which is effectively the stablecoin bill coming out of the Senate. There are some discussions on provisions with respect to how individuals in government can participate there, how they could participate in other parts of the crypto ecosystem. Another big point that is contentious right now or being debated is the ability to offer yield on stablecoins. We think it just makes sense. The yield that's being earned is really just going to the issuers themselves, whether it's Circle or Tether. All of the crypto companies out there are a proponent of the bill allowing for the yield to be shared with the individual users. This is obviously our mindset, frankly, the mindset of some of our peers as well. Crypto is all about individuals. Let's bring the value to them. And that's a big part of what we think makes sense for the stablecoin bill.

Yeah, we expect that will be part of the legislation. It's there in the bill now. We expect that to go forward. Like I said, the president is communicating he's ready to sign these things. So we just got to get them through Congress.

So, there's two things. You hit it really well. There's all these different regulators out there and there's both the less explicit actions these regulators were taking. Go back 18 months ago, 12 months ago with Choke Point 2.0, putting pressure on banks telling them they're unable to offer anything in crypto. There was of course the explicit, which was rolling back that accounting bulletin, SAB 121 or whatever, that prevented banks from essentially custodying cryptocurrency on their balance sheets. And so we see that, plus they see the bills moving forward, and on top of that it's just a positive environment now. The administration broadly supports crypto, wants to see the innovation happen and wants to see it happen in the US. And so now all of these larger financial institutions are coming with a very supportive approach towards crypto and they want to bring it into their offerings. Many of them, and I mean these are the largest of the large financial institutions here in the United States, have basically looked me in the eye and said, look, we're committed to get this done within the next year. We will bring Bitcoin and crypto to our customers. Larger consumer brokers, retail brokers, banks, very large banks are on this path right now and so we think it's fantastic. At Kraken we're looking to grow crypto adoption broadly to achieve this goal of financial freedom and so we want everybody to adopt.

I mean, if you just go through that top 10 list you'll probably get a bunch of hits there.

Yeah. So, this is helpful. Let me back it up a little bit because the broader thing that's going on right now that I see is convergence. It's a number of different things. All financial services firms will offer both crypto and traditional financial services products down the road. And the two will in some instances blur together. Crypto will power some of the traditional financial services products. Tokenized equities is a perfect example of that. On the flip side, Kraken also now offers traditional equities. We're a registered FINRA broker-dealer offering traditional equities to US customers. The tokenized equities is a new offering that is more targeted towards people outside the United States.

Yeah. The tokenized equities, they'll ride on the Solana blockchain. We just announced at an event they had on the East Coast and we're super excited for this, coming soon. We'll be really the frontier for crypto plus traditional financial services.

Yeah, so you're absolutely right. There's a number of different models out there and I think there's going to be a whole host of different models where companies launch tokenized equities here in the United States, outside the United States, Europe as well. I was actually in Europe at a conference called EuroFi, which is basically a regulator conference, a bit different than this. All of the regulators there, a bit different, not as many lights, not as much orange, and they all wanted to talk about tokenized equities. And so there will be a number of approaches that will work in sandboxes in different parts of the world, approaches that will be very much built on crypto rails, others that will be more targeted to people outside of specific European or western jurisdictions. So I think there's a lot of opportunity out there for this to happen.

Well, look, we have a number of different peers, because we actually see that, as part of what I said with convergence, it all starts with the individuals, our customers. They may invest in crypto and use Kraken, but they likely already have exposure to stocks and other financial instruments at other venues. Kraken, we're looking to offer all of those different components to our customers. Yes, that means that we will have more and more overlap with various other traditional financial service firms by definition, but I think it's a combination. Frankly, a big push that we're making right now with this new product that we offer is called Embedded Crypto-as-a-Service. Basically, we deconstruct all the components of what Kraken is, a full-service crypto platform, and offer them to other financial institutions such that they can offer crypto to their customers. And this is where the big banks and other big brokers come in on how we might partner with them to bring this to their customers.

Yeah, so NinjaTrader is actually a really interesting business, in great alignment for Kraken. Our heritage and our sweet spot with our platform has been individual advanced traders, individual pro traders, that prosumer group. We've built fantastic products for that group. One of the first to offer multi-token margin futures to this group in the geographies where we offer. NinjaTrader is the largest retail futures broker in the US targeting that same group of similar type of customers. Now many of them probably aren't trading crypto and vice versa. And so bringing those two pieces together and reinforcing the technology prowess of both companies is going to be a great opportunity for us.

No. Look, NinjaTrader is a fantastic business. Spent a lot of time with their leadership team. Marty, CEO of the business, he's a fantastic leader. We're absolutely excited to have them part of the portfolio. They are a company that has strong customer traction, delivers strong revenue, strong profitability, and so they are a substantially successful business in their own right.

Well, this is an unsurprising question. We just started publishing our financial highlights. 2024, 1.5 billion in revenue and considerable profitability. Q1, nearly 500 million in revenue, considerable profitability. That doesn't even include the NinjaTrader acquisition. So, just annualizing that out, two billion plus. And so we're on a strong trajectory, posting strong numbers, strong growth, strong profitability. Many had this question on IPO. It's absolutely on the road map. Specific timing though, we're not sharing specific timing just yet, but yeah, it's definitely out there.

Well, this is a fantastic question. Kraken is absolutely a stalwart when it comes to security and that has many layers. It's technical security, operational security, physical security. All of these pieces have to come together in order to offer truly a secure platform across the board and that's what we do. Nick Percoco leads our security team, chief security officer, he's been with Kraken for a long time, has built an incredible foundation for us. We also have Kraken Security Labs, which is really at the forefront of security for both cryptography and cryptocurrency and is looked to across the industry as one of the leaders in security. In this particular instance, we for sure are ahead of these attacks. I guess I could say without maybe sharing too much, ahead of these attacks. They are of course pointed at Kraken as well and we have been incredibly successful identifying them, sniffing them out ahead of time, subduing them, protecting against them with controls, monitoring all these various different pieces such that we protect not just the financial assets but also our customers' private information and so forth.