(Bloomberg) -- The crypto exchange Kraken, which has long-held aspirations of becoming a publicly-traded company, said revenue more than doubled during last year’s record-breaking digital asset market rally.
The San Francisco-area based trading platform’s revenue was $1.5 billion, compared with $671 million in the prior year. Adjusted earnings before items such as taxes reached $380 million in 2024. The company said it finished the year with 2.6 million funded accounts and there were $42.8 billion in assets held on the platform.
“This is what we look at, this is how we hold ourselves accountable,” Arjun Sethi, co-chief executive of the privately-held company, said in an interview. Kraken plans to continue providing quarterly financial reports, with an ever-increasing array of metrics, he said.
Sharing the data “gives us an ability to turn on the lights for when we are ready for the possibility” of an IPO, Sethi said.
Sethi, the co-founder of venture firm Tribe Capital, took on the added role of Kraken co-CEO toward the end of last year while the digital-asset sector was surging as Donald Trump shifted from being a crypto skeptic to an enthusiastic booster. Kraken was among the many industry participants who threw their support behind Trump during the presidential campaign.
Kraken, which was founded in 2011, had been the subject of crypto enforcement actions under the Biden administration. In 2023, Kraken settled US Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that it broke the agency’s rules with its US crypto staking products and discontinued them. The firm reintroduced its staking service in 39 states on Thursday. It’s still battling another SEC action, accusing the company of operating as an unregistered exchange, broker dealer and clearing agency.
Kraken considered raising a pre-IPO round last year, Bloomberg reported earlier. The firm has only raised about $27 million in primary capital.
“We have the optionality to raise money or to raise debt if we want to do that,” Sethi said. “All of the options of access to capital are available to us, regardless of whether we are private or public.”
Coinbase Global Inc., the biggest US crypto exchange, is estimated to have had revenue last year of around $6 billion, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The company, which went public in 2021, is scheduled to report 2024 results on Feb. 13.
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