Kraken Returns with Free Trading | Hacker News Reader

Kraken Returns with Free Trading

blog.kraken.com

44 pointsifdefdebug21 comments

Am I interpreting this correctly:

- Margin positions will remain open

- Margin liquidations will be paused for at least 48 hours

So if bitcoin makes any big moves in the next 48 hours, there won't be any margin calls and the traders might end up with a giant debt to kraken because the positions won't automatically close? This sounds like extremely risky, and if I'm correct, might make Kraken go bankrupt if the moves are big enough, taking down with it everyone's assets still on Kraken.

> Withdrawals are now disabled and will remain disabled for a minimum of 12 hours

Can't even secure your assets for the next 12 hours if you wanted to.

Let's hope for Kraken that the coins trade sideways the next 48 hours.

They screwed up in a big way by not having processes and QA in place to catch these issues or gradually roll out the change or pull it if it goes south. That does not inspire confidence in their abilities to operate and secure an exchange in the long run. But we'll see what they do in reflection of this event and how/what they'll change.

That said, they've shown communication around this and the free trading is not something they HAD to do, but a gesture of apology.

in the end we'll remember this: kraken went down for 48 hours and offered free trading for 2 weeks. Of all the horrible things that exchanges have done or failed to do, there is some solace here and means kraken isn't AS bad as some of the others. so, yay for that i guess.

Or they'll learn from their mistakes and become better... Let's hope for the best !

They stopped trading again because order books are not displayed properly. [1]

Great to see them back online.

[1] https://status.kraken.com/incidents/nswthr1lyx72

Any docs on designing trading engines? How to process trades efficiently and correctly? What kind of algorithms, datastructures to use to make the trading engine scale?

I thought this kind of stuff is a solved issue, some kind of distributed queueing messaging engine with the trading logic at the collector of all these trading messages.

I don't have a crypto-specific resource, but market microstructure is the general field you're looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_microstructure

I liked this one by Martin Fowler a few years ago: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

That's something that I've been trying to find myself, with not that much luck.

Jane Street Capital has a nice video presentation though: https://blog.janestreet.com/how-to-build-an-exchange/

Still getting 522s and intermittent site under maintenance notices. The trading system being unavailable is one thing, but not being able to keep a web application up under a moderate amount of traffic really does not inspire confidence in the engineering behind their service.

Almost all of the exchanges still scream hobbyist; even (and perhaps notoriously) coinbase is crazily unprofessional given the ludicrously large fees they charge. They need to improve their game, or when Schwab / ETrade / Ameritrade finally wake up and smell the coffee they'll take the market.

Don't most people use Gdax instead of Coinbase for the 'real stuff'?

Can't really tell a difference, the site is still sluggish as before. Sure they didn't just revert to their old code because the new didn't work out in production?

It actually returns "Service unavailable" when I try to trade -- so that, too, is similar to before the outage.

Looks like they mostly improved their trading engine, and, to their defence, I do not have seen one of the dreaded 520 errors yet.

https://blog.kraken.com/post/1449/

I now see 522 errors! That is an improvement though, I guess...

If you look at their announcements and blog posts, their company mantra seems to be „overpromise & underdeliver“

Site is as sluggish as ever. But my balance total shows me something above $7,000,000.00 when I only have a few hundred $ actually. Is this a new feature?

I tried to transfer some coins in earlier today, still no sign of them hours later.

Doesn't seem like there was any improvement despite this upgrade. Sadly there's really no alternatives for Canadians.

> Doesn't seem like there was any improvement despite this upgrade. Sadly there's really no alternatives for Canadians.

I'd say there was some improvement, I can now login again. Sadly indeed, reasonable alternatives are too hard to find.

The founder made his start facilitating real money trading (sometimes against ToS) in online games via sites like lewt.com and d2legit.com: https://www.bitrated.com/jespow. I'd say his execution at Kraken is living up what you'd expect from someone with his background.

A "deposit but can't withdraw" policy, however temporary, should be a huge red flag about their solvency.

I interpreted the "deposit but can't withdraw" policy more as an attempt to avoid an immediate bank run. It could be a good business decision whether they're solvent or not.

The purpose is not to prevent bank run. People had plenty of time to run if they wanted. The purpose of stopping withdrawals is to make sure people don't take advantage of any bugs that are still present. Like the poster here who reports having $7M in his account, rather than the expected few hundred.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com