Kraken Adds Tribe’s Arjun Sethi to Its Board Amidst Further Funding

Co-founder of Tribe Capital, Arjun Sethi, has joined the board of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. This news comes on the back of several months of heavy investment by Tribe in the exchange.

Tribe Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm from San Francisco. They currently have more than $1 billion in assets under management.

Founded just over ten years ago, Kraken offers cryptocurrency trading, as well as several fiat currencies. They saw a huge jump in trading volume during Q1, with over $160 billion being processed. This was in line with other platforms such as Coinbase and BlockFi who all saw trading volumes increase in line with bitcoin’s (BTC) rally.

Kraken has been considering a public offering, after Coinbase went public, last month. They’ve also been raising fresh funding as they seek a valuation above $20 billion. Sethi had the following to say on Tribe Capital’s future work with Kraken:

“With a focus on product, engineering and data science, our team helped with the early growth of companies including Facebook, Airbnb, Slack, Uber, and Yahoo, and are excited to help Kraken accelerate its growth,”

This follows recent news that Electric Capital and Tekne Capital Management LLC recently invested in the exchange.

A spokeswoman for Kraken said they might consider going public next year through a direct listing and a SPAC transaction would no longer be likely due to their size.

Troubles with IRS

Kraken has been the victim of several probes by the IRS of late. The most serious of which being a John Doe order severed by a district court in California this month, which seeks the personal information of Kraken customers.

This came before the central bank of China issued further extensions to 2017 regulations that seek to limit cryptocurrency trading, which seriously affected the price of bitcoin and many other major cryptocurrencies.