Money20/20: exchanges are navigating regulation and building trust

The global head of banking and payments at Kraken Kaushik Sthankiya and the president of the CoinW exchange Sonia Shaw discuss the state of cryptocurrency exchanges at the Money20/20 event in Amsterdam.

The FTX collapse in 2022 brought bearish sentiment to the crypto ecosystem and many traders and investors wondered if they could trust crypto exchanges. 

Shaw says that the industry is still recovering from the FTX collapse while trying to rebuild consumer confidence with regulatory support. 

“Everything is definitely coming back, but we haven’t really got back to the 2021 peak yet,” she added. “I mean we’re still at the early stage of this whole market coming back, so I think we’re on the way of repairing the confidence from consumers and also the regulators.”

The CoinW president stated that the exchange is expanding to the Middle East and is still navigating “all the regulations.” 

Moreover, Kraken’s Sthankiya says the exchange is currently focused on growing its suite of products and entering new jurisdictions while ensuring regulatory compliance. He emphasized that the exchange’s superior customer service, deep liquidity, and compliance are the key strengths of Kraken while major exchanges, Binance, for example, faced regulatory hurdles.

Sthankiya added that the approval of spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs in the U.S. had a “phenomenally positive” impact on crypto trading on centralized exchanges (CEXs).

Both industry experts showed a positive outlook on the crypto ecosystem. The Kraken head of banking believes that CEXs “play a leading role in helping to grow adoption of crypto.” 

On the other hand, Shaw expects that the crypto trend will go from “global to local” due to different regulations in different jurisdictions.