Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi on the vision for Krak: one app, one balance, built-in yield, and instant, free cross-border settlement "Most fintechs are on UI rented on layers. Our goal has been, let's do the hard stuff first. Every layer we own, we can price toward costs and then give that to our customers." "One app, one balance, like we have for Krak today, and their money in theory never sits idle and never waits for the Monday." "They can also have agents that work on their behalf. They might not know it's agents, they're just pressing buttons to say please help me with something or I want to be able to get yield." "You get paid in euros within seconds. It's in your balance in the infrastructure, but it's surfaced as one balance. And then you have access to instant euro payments. It goes across borders in seconds and it costs you nothing. Zero." "We're not doing any rent extraction. We're able to do it because we're on top of onchain or DeFi liquidity, depending on how it's built out. Because it moves on stablecoin rails today, instead of correspondent banks, you're removing that intermediary."

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi on why the exchange is buying a bank to give customers yield and loans "We've agreed to acquire a company called Saldo, which is the bank in Lithuania. We're still going to work with regulators and hopefully, knock on wood, we expect that to happen, closed out in 2027." "I think today a payments firm can park your money. It has safeguard. It's one for one in some cases. It can't pay you on it. And it can't lend against it. A bank can do both." "I always go back to first principle, which is collateral. What you want to be able to do for your customers with collateral is anything that a bank can do." "Lending against what you hold becomes really important for that collateral. Getting yield, as much yield as possible becomes important." "A lot of people ask, why are you doing these? It's because our customers have been asking for all of these products and services around banking and asset management." "A bank license in one EU country then can also passport to the other member states."