RE: 🐙 Kraken Is Coming for Payments — And Banks Should Be Paying Attention

This is definitely interesting ! But I can see the legacy financial system ensuring Kraken are regulated into uncompetitiveness. They've got huge lobbying power to get laws and regulations pushed through, and will move heaven and earth to ensure Kraken have to do KYC and have the kind of regulatory costs that will wipe out any edge they have.

We saw something similar here in the UK when Metro Bank tried to set up as a challenger bank after the 2008 banking crisis. The "Big 4" legacy banks absolutely buried them with negative press, new regulations, higher capital holding requirements and everything else they could get to stick (including deeply personal and nasty attacks on the CEO and his family). It ended up that Metro Bank just couldn't compete, and although they're still here they have been forced to be significantly more expensive than the legacy banks, and are a shadow of what they could have been.