Kraken Retracts Withdrawal Questions and Keeps the Listing

Kraken Pulls Use-of-Funds Questions

Kraken has apologized to customers and withdrawn a set of questions it had emailed to people withdrawing privacy coin Monero (XMR), closing a dispute that spread across crypto media on 24 October. The messages went to clients who had bought the coin with their own money, and they asked for the customer's employer, the source of the funds and the intended use of the coins after withdrawal. Arjun Sethi, the exchange's co-CEO, said asking what money that has already left the platform is spent on was unacceptable, and the company pulled the questionnaire in full. He distinguished that practice from source-of-funds checks, which he called reasonable; those checks remain in place. Customers who received the emails were told they need not submit any information. Alongside the apology, Kraken confirmed that Monero stays listed in the regions it still serves, a point that carries weight given how far the exchange has already retreated from the coin elsewhere. The disputed questions sat inside an enhanced due diligence, or EDD, procedure, a deeper vetting layer that exchanges apply when a transaction is judged to carry elevated risk. That layer did not stop at a reason for the transaction: it demanded an account of how the withdrawn Monero would be used once it reached a customer's own wallet. Sethi's framing splits the compliance task in two. Checking where money comes from, he argued, can serve a legitimate purpose; demanding to know where it goes afterwards treats lawful customers as suspects. Screenshots of the emails first circulated through the Wu Blockchain account on X, with wider coverage following on 24 October. Exchanges have tightened customer checks for years to meet anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing obligations, and the episode shows how far such demands can overshoot before a correction comes.

Monero's place on Kraken differs sharply by region, and that split frames the retraction. The first exit came in the United Kingdom in 2021. Ireland and Belgium followed in 2024. From October 2024, customers across the European Economic Area could no longer trade or deposit, with the XMR/USD, XMR/EUR, XMR/BTC and XMR/USDT markets all shut at once and the exchange's Monero trading volume in the bloc ended. In Canada, deposits stopped in August 2025 and trading in September 2025, leaving withdrawals as the only open function. These moves track the European Union's MiCA framework and its new anti-money-laundering regulation, both of which press service providers to re-examine anonymity-enabled coins; Monero obscures transaction details by design, which is why regulators single it out, since analysts cannot follow funds across an opaque chain the way they can on transparent ledgers. The pressure is not confined to one exchange. Binance announced its own Monero delisting in February 2024, and OKX has cleared privacy coins from its boards as well. Against that record, the decision to keep Monero listed in the remaining regions is the striking part: Kraken is holding the market while trimming its questions. The coin's technical privacy stack also extends beyond transaction blinding; the project's Kovri routing work hides network-level traffic, a layer most traded assets have no equivalent of. For customers who prefer to move coins off the exchange entirely, our guide to using Monero walks through the self-custody steps.

A Listing Held Where Rules Allow

The episode draws a working boundary inside compliance itself. Source-of-funds checks rest on solid ground under anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing rules, and Kraken has kept them; use-of-funds demands on money already withdrawn drift toward surveillance of lawful spending, and the co-CEO's own concession made that explicit. For Monero, the retained listing matters commercially: a regulated venue stays open where rules still allow it, while developers draft an FCMP++ timeline covering 150 million outputs, a design that would harden privacy further, and perpetual futures open interest crossed $300M earlier this year as speculative positioning built. XMR slipped 5.1% over the past 24 hours, and Monero technical analysis frames the move for traders watching whether the retraction steadies positioning. The retraction, dated 24 October, stands as Kraken's most recent completed step on Monero; no further scheduled decision is on record.