Who are Kraken's decision-makers?

Jesse Powell founded Kraken in 2011 after helping the hacked Mt. Gox exchange recover — a formative experience that shaped Kraken's decade-long commitment to security, solvency, and regulatory compliance over growth-at-all-costs. He served as sole CEO for over a decade, building Kraken into a $2.2B-revenue platform while raising only $27M in primary capital. Powell stepped back to Chairman in April 2023, a transition he framed as allowing him to focus on long-term mission and decentralization principles. He remains an influential voice on company culture and strategy.

David Ripley joined Kraken through the 2017 acquisition of Glidera, the crypto brokerage he co-founded. After serving as COO, he became sole CEO in April 2023 when Powell stepped aside. He brings product-engineering depth and operational discipline; his prior roles include software engineering and mobile product at Syclo, later acquired by SAP. Arjun Sethi joined the Kraken board in 2021 via Tribe Capital's ~$120M investment and became co-CEO in October 2024. Sethi is a two-time founder who ran data and mobile teams at Yahoo and whose venture portfolio includes Slack, Rippling, and xAI. His mandate at Kraken is accelerating the IPO, building the institutional product suite, and driving international expansion. The co-CEO appointment coincided with a ~400-person layoff that Sethi framed as flattening the organization for public-company efficiency.

The 2025 additions complete the pre-IPO C-suite build-out. Ben Gray joined as CLO in February 2025, bringing experience as Global General Counsel at Paxos Trust and Deputy GC/Global CCO at Block (Square) — arguably the two most legally sophisticated companies in the crypto-adjacent fintech world. His appointment signals Kraken is treating compliance and regulatory risk as a first-order leadership priority, not a support function. Curtis Ting was elevated to COO in late 2024, owning the operational infrastructure and vendor landscape. Stephanie Lemmerman, appointed CFO in October 2024, was fired in February 2026 just months before the planned IPO window, with Robert Moore (previously VP of Business Expansion) stepping in as Deputy CFO while a permanent search is underway.

At Kraken's current scale and IPO-preparation stage, purchasing authority is distributed across a formal buying committee rather than resting with a single executive. The co-CEOs (Sethi and Ripley) own strategic vendor relationships and any deal with material contract value or board-level visibility. Curtis Ting as COO controls operational infrastructure and vendor consolidation decisions — he is the right first call for mid-market infrastructure, operations tooling, and exchange platform providers.

The Deputy CFO Robert Moore controls finance, audit, and compliance-tooling spend — a particularly active category ahead of the S-1 process, SOX readiness, and MiCA compliance requirements. Ben Gray's CLO office oversees legal-tech, regulatory reporting software, and compliance vendor relationships — another high-priority category given the company's regulatory footprint across 190+ countries, the Wyoming SPDI, and now the Federal Reserve master account. For technology infrastructure decisions, Kraken's engineering leadership (currently without a named CTO following Vishnu Patankar's 2024 departure) drives platform and infrastructure vendor choices through a committee of senior engineering VPs.

For NinjaTrader-specific technology decisions — futures data feeds, broker connectivity tools, desktop platform infrastructure — the Austin-based NinjaTrader product team maintains its own operational budget and operates with a meaningful degree of autonomy from the core Kraken procurement function in San Francisco. Enterprise sales reps should map their buyer to the right office and budget owner accordingly.

Kraken operates as a remote-first company with teams distributed across 60+ countries, though key leadership is concentrated in San Francisco and — since the NinjaTrader acquisition — in Austin. The October 2024 restructuring cut approximately 400 roles and organizational layers in an explicit flattening for public-company governance. A second round of approximately 150 cuts came in May 2026 as Kraken deployed AI tools to automate support and operational functions, suggesting continued cost-structure optimization ahead of public-market margin scrutiny.

The company now has three main business units: Consumer (the Kraken app, Kraken+, instant buy/sell), Pro and Institutional (Kraken Pro order-book, OTC desk, Kraken Institutional, custody), and Derivatives and Multi-Asset (NinjaTrader, xStocks, tokenized equity perpetuals, U.S. stocks and ETFs). Each unit has dedicated product and engineering leadership reporting to the co-CEOs. The Kraken Financial subsidiary (under the Wyoming SPDI charter and now the Fed master account) operates under its own regulatory compliance stack managed separately from the exchange, with Ben Gray's CLO function providing oversight across both entities.

The board has been built out ahead of the public listing with investor representatives from Hummingbird Ventures and Tribe Capital, plus independent directors added as part of IPO governance requirements. Jesse Powell's role as Chairman gives the board continuity with the company's founding values while providing Sethi and Ripley operational autonomy over the day-to-day business.