Kraken Is Betting The Next Crypto Exchange War Is Won With AI Agents — Here’s The Plan
Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is rebuilding its app around artificial intelligence (AI), with agentic trading — where AI systems execute trades autonomously on a user’s behalf — at the center of the relaunch. The exchange told CNBC that it believes this shift represents the next major competitive battleground for crypto platforms.
How Kraken’s App Works
According to CNBC’s report, once a user opens the Kraken app, the AI immediately begins gathering information — goals, risk tolerance, funding preferences, and financial profile — and uses it to build a draft portfolio. The user reviews it, makes adjustments, and approves it.
After that, the platform keeps running in the background. It surfaces market news relevant to the user’s holdings, flags opportunities like idle cash sitting unused, and gradually shapes itself around how each individual actually uses it.
Kraken’s chief data officer, Kamo Asatryan, told CNBC, “Talking to Kraken should be like talking to your well-informed best friend who knows a lot about finance but also knows a lot about you,” he said. The executive argued that artificial intelligence is positioned to do for investing what mobile trading did a decade ago — except where mobile gave people access, AI can give them competence.
This follows similar moves by direct competitors Coinbase (COIN) and Gemini (GMEI) earlier this year. Both companies have introduced AI-assisted trading features and developer tools in recent months.
Kraken’s differentiation is the degree to which it is embedding AI into the core structure of the app rather than layering it on as a feature. Asatryan flagged that as autonomous agents grow more capable, the key relationships on financial platforms will increasingly be between AI systems and markets rather than between human users and interfaces.
What The Crypto Exchange Has Planned Next
Kraken was founded in 2011 and is one of the oldest crypto exchanges still operating. Its existing user base skews toward institutions, professional traders, trading firms, and active leverage traders,
CNBC reported that the new AI-focused direction is explicitly aimed at expanding beyond that base, targeting everyday retail investors who have historically bought at peaks and sold at lows out of emotional reaction rather than informed strategy.
During his interview, Asatryan also made an observation about bear markets — most crypto exchanges struggle when prices fall because their retail users disengage. Active traders, by contrast, find opportunity in any direction. AI, he argued, can help close that gap.
Asatryan also outlined a longer-term direction that goes beyond trading. Kraken is looking to expand into payments, banking, and lending — areas he described as largely untouched by crypto historically.
Stablecoins and tokenized assets are what open those doors, he said, and AI is what makes them accessible to users who have never used a crypto exchange for anything beyond buying and selling.
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