Kraken Rebuilds Its App Around AI Agents to Fight Retail FOMO

Kraken told CNBC on July 10 it is rebuilding its app around agentic AI trading, autonomous agents that draft portfolios, watch markets and trade in plain English. The move makes Kraken the fourth major exchange this year to ship the feature, after Bitget, Gemini and Coinbase.

Kraken’s pitch is that the tool will stop everyday investors from buying tops and selling bottoms out of panic. Its own chief data officer says the fix works by turning those same investors into high-frequency traders.

An App That Talks Before It Trades

Kraken’s chief data officer, Kamo Asatryan, said the new app abandons the trading-first interface that has defined crypto exchanges for more than a decade. Onboarding now starts with a conversation instead of a chart.

The app asks new users about their goals, risk tolerance and funding preferences in a single flow, then hands back a draft portfolio it can explain and the user can edit before funding it. Once invested, the AI keeps working in the background.

• Onboarding that learns goals, risk tolerance and funding preferences in one flow
• A draft portfolio the AI can explain, which the user reviews and adjusts before funding it
• Ongoing AI-curated insights and news tied to the user’s actual holdings
• Proactive nudges, like flagging idle cash sitting unproductively in an account
• A conversational interface that reshapes itself around each user over time

The rebuild also ships an open-source developer tool, the Kraken CLI, a command-line interface for building trading agents, complete with safety confirmations for risky commands and a paper-trading mode for testing strategies without real money. It is freely available on GitHub.

“This won’t be an AI assistant or a copilot bolted onto the old version of the app,” the company said in a blog post shared with The Block. Researchers studying the category describe the shift in more technical terms: an agent can track news, macro signals and forecasts at once and adjust its trade instructions as conditions change, inside a single decision pipeline.

Kraken’s existing base skews toward institutions, trading firms and leverage traders who already behave like professionals. The new app targets a different, newer cohort: retail users Kraken is trying to bring online for the first time.

Kraken’s Cure for FOMO Looks a Lot Like FOMO

Asatryan explained why exchanges struggle when crypto prices fall. “Traditionally, exchanges have trouble in bear markets because most of their customers have trouble in bear markets,” he told CNBC.

He described retail behavior in specific terms: traders driven by fear of missing out, or FOMO, buy in at the peak, sell when prices are down, and then churn out of the market entirely. Professional traders do the opposite, he said, staying active through every cycle. “Our pro traders are highly active, they engage with the platform, they continue to trade,” Asatryan said.

Kraken’s answer is to give retail users that same always-on posture through an agent Asatryan compares to a friend, not a stranger with a spreadsheet.

your well-informed best friend who knows a lot about finance but also knows a lot about you

Asatryan used that phrase to describe the whole point of the redesign: an agent that learns a user’s goals and helps them work through assets and markets in conversation, without requiring them to become a professional trader themselves.

The same conversation, he said, could turn ordinary users into rapid-fire traders without them ever touching a chart. “There’s an opportunity for everyday people to become high-frequency traders and do so using plain English,” Asatryan said. Either way, each of those trades still clears through Kraken’s own order book.

Why Rebuild the App Right Before an IPO?

Kraken’s agentic relaunch lands weeks before the exchange is expected to price a long-delayed stock listing. Kraken confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in November 2025, targeting an $800 million raise at a $20 billion valuation. It paused that plan in March, and the valuation has since slipped to roughly $13.3 billion.

Retail sentiment has not soured. On Stocktwits, sentiment around Kraken’s pre-IPO ticker, KRAKZZX, was running extremely bullish at a reflected price of $32.94 the day the agentic trading story broke, with investors now penciling in a third-quarter listing.

The underlying business has momentum to point to. Kraken generated $1.5 billion in revenue in 2024, a 123% jump from the prior year, and its parent, Payward, reported adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $531 million for 2025, up 26%. Kraken counted more than 13 million verified clients worldwide as of March 31, 2026, with funded accounts up 50% year over year to 5.7 million by the end of 2025. That gives Kraken one more product to show investors before it prices shares.

Kraken Enters a Field Four Deep

Kraken is not first, and it is not pretending to be. Bitget upgraded its Agent Hub for faster AI-driven trading in March. Gemini rolled out its own Agentic Trading feature in late April, letting users plug models like Claude and ChatGPT directly into their accounts. Coinbase followed in June with agentic trading support and Coinbase Advisor, an SEC-registered AI investment adviser. Kraken is the fourth to arrive.

The pattern extends well beyond crypto. A recent Google Cloud survey found 83% of firms need agentic AI infrastructure to stay competitive, and a PwC survey of more than 300 companies found 79% are already adopting AI agents in some form. News of Kraken’s plans traveled fast once CNBC broke it. TLDR Newsletter told its subscribers on X that AI agents would execute trades autonomously within user-set parameters, a summary that spread within hours.

When Every Agent Reads the Same Signal

Kraken says a human still has to approve every trade, a guardrail every rival makes too. Critics of the category point to what happens once agents, not people, are watching the tape.

When Gemini launched its own agentic trading feature in April, the reaction split fast on social media. Detractors warned that agents chasing the same signal at once could intensify flash crashes in the market. Regulators, meanwhile, are still working out how existing rules apply once an AI agent is the one making the call.

A separate strand of research gives the skeptics data to point to. Dualmedia’s review of the category cites a 2026 study of onchain AI agent economies that found median returns came in negative across every platform studied.

• $191.7 million in losses absorbed by everyday token holders across the platforms studied
• $30 million in paper gains retained instead by the agent treasuries themselves
• 81.4% of all gains, worth $1.81 billion, captured by just the top 1% of wallets
• 93% average decline in agent tokens from their all-time highs

That research covers a different corner of crypto, autonomous agents that hold and manage their own tokens, not a custodial exchange’s advisory tool. The underlying worry rhymes with the one aimed at Kraken, Gemini and Coinbase: automation without transparency can concentrate gains at the top.

Kraken’s Bet Beyond the Exchange

Asatryan frames agentic trading as a bridge to something larger than spot trading fees. Kraken wants to become a full financial services platform spanning payments, banking and lending.

He said crypto has barely touched those areas until now, framing the opportunity as one where stablecoins and tokenized assets bring “a lot more access and capability, use cases and utility beyond exchanges.” He predicted AI would make all of it usable by ordinary people. “AI is going to make all of that super accessible to everyone,” he said.

The groundwork is already underway. Kraken is racing Coinbase and Kalshi to list regulated US bitcoin perpetual futures contracts, and it has partnered with MoneyGram to let customers cash out crypto in more than 100 countries. Kraken wants the agentic app to serve as the single interface across trading, payments, banking and lending.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Agentic Trading, Exactly?

Agentic trading uses AI agents that weigh multiple signals at once, learn from new data and pursue a goal a user sets. Older trading bots simply follow one fixed if-then rule. On Kraken, Gemini, Coinbase and Bitget, that still stops short of full autonomy: a person has to approve each trade before it executes.

Will Kraken’s AI Ever Trade Without My Approval?

No. Kraken says every suggested trade needs the customer’s explicit confirmation before it is placed. The company calls the feature a decision-support tool.

When Does Kraken’s New App Launch?

Kraken has not announced a specific launch date. The company has confirmed the rebuild is underway and described its direction in detail, but as of publication the agentic version of the app remains in development.

Is Kraken Still Planning an IPO in 2026?

Yes, as of the most recent public comments. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in May that Kraken was roughly 80% ready for a listing, and traders on Stocktwits have been pricing the pre-IPO stock in extremely bullish territory, though some reports suggest the listing could slip into 2027 if conditions stay difficult.

Who Is Legally Responsible If the AI’s Advice Loses Money?

Kraken has structured the advice function around two entities. In the United States, guidance on crypto assets comes from Payward Interactive, Inc., while guidance on securities comes from Kraken Adviser LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Kraken has also said publicly that AI-generated recommendations carry risk, including the loss of capital, and are not guaranteed to work for every user.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment or trading advice. Cryptocurrency trading, including through AI-assisted or agentic tools, carries significant risk, including the possible loss of principal. Consult a licensed financial professional before making investment decisions. Figures in this article are accurate as of publication on July 11, 2026.