Margin Trading Returns on Kraken; Free Trading to Continue Through January

It’s official–margin trading has returned to cryptocurrency exchange Kraken after being unavailable since January 13th. Additionally, rollover fees on the platform have been reduced to .005%.

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Margin trading on Kraken was temporarily suspended following weeks of poor performance that ultimately resulted in an unexpected 48-hour service outage in the middle of January; the exchange has also offered fee-free trading until the end of the month to make up for the difficulties caused by Kraken’s technical issues.

The Trouble’s Over–For Now

Kraken has become particularly popular in the crypto space because of the wide range of altcoins that are offered on the exchange.

The trouble started in mid-December, when Kraken acknowledged that due to an unprecedented number of new registrants (as many as 50,000 per day) the platform had “degraded” and that its performance was “unreliable”. At the same time, Kraken announced that it would soon implement software upgrades that would repair the system.

Then, on January 11th, Kraken unexpectedly went offline for a total of 48 hours; the outage was originally intended to be several hours of scheduled downtime for site maintenance. By the time the site was back online on January 13th, software upgrades on the platform had been fully activated.

Thankfully, no user funds were lost as a result of any of the exchange’s technical problems, although all orders that were active on the books prior to the software upgrade needed to be re-entered.

To make up for the lost time, Kraken announced that all trades on the platform would be free until the end of the month of January (well-played, Kraken).

Kraken was one of many exchanges to experience technical difficulties in the month of December due to a massive influx of new users. The advent of Bitcoin futures trading on CME and CBOE caused a wave of FOMO (fear of missing out) that ultimately inspired millions of people to enter the cryptosphere; Coinbase, GDAX, and Bitstamp are just a few of the many other trading platforms were also affected by service outages in December.