Kraken To List Basic Attention Token (BAT) and Waves

Kraken has announced they will be listing BAT and WAVES, with pairs denominated in USD, EUR, BTC, and ETH. Trading commences at 13:30 UTC on August 22, 2019, and deposits will take 30 and 10 confirmations before being credited to users Kraken balances for BAT and WAVES, respectively, August 21, 2019.

Kraken Expands Altcoin Offerings

Kraken is no stranger to anyone in the cryptocurrency world; it’s one of the largest exchanges that recently introduced margin trading facilities as well.

BAT and WAVES will initially be listed for Kraken, Kraken Pro, and OTC users. Futures and margin trading capabilities for the two new altcoins will not be available for the near future.

Kraken is currently expanding the number of coins they have on their exchange, but this requires a significant amount of research into the project as well as setting up the necessary infrastructure to support the tokens.

As part of their policy, Kraken never reveals what assets they’re looking into. This is in stark contrast to Coinbase who first announce research efforts and then take a decision on whether to list or not.

Kraken was one of the first exchanges to join in the Delist BSV movement after Changpeng Zhao of Binance revealed his exchange would be doing so in rebuttal to Craig Wright’s power trips.

Rush of Liquidity

Many are wondering when this so-called “alt season” is going to show up as they invested significant amounts of capital into various projects.

Looking at the market during the last bull run, the real alt season only set in during January 2018 and extended till March 2018. This means that – at least historically – the altcoin rush comes after BTC tops out and allows investors to spread out capital.

However, the advent of stablecoins has limited the potential for an exponential alt season as investors can hedge their BTC gains in stablecoins like Tether and DAI without having to push capital into alts.

If major exchanges like Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance continue to list altcoins with strong fundamentals, they will augment market liquidity for these altcoins and make them accessible to most of the cryptocurrency market.

This liquidity rush could help the alt season set in when the time comes, but the downside is with margin trading and futures, players now have an equally robust opportunity to short these coins into oblivion.