Kraken is making big moves in 2026 with plans to expand its footprint outside of the traditional crypto exchange ecosystem. On the side lines of the Solana Breakpoint 2025 conference recently held in Abu Dhabi, Coin Headlines caught up with Mark Greenberg to get an idea of what Kraken’s 2026 would look like.
Greenberg, based in Canada, serves as the VP and GM of consumer products at Kraken.
Kraken is looking to chase the ‘anti-bank’ strategy – wherein it would aim to allow users to spend any asset, anywhere. These assets could be cryptocurrencies, tokenized stocks, or fiats. Essentially, Kraken wants to bridge the gap between the daily spending account and the trading portfolio.
Neobank nuance
Greenberg explained that in the next leg of its growth, Kraken is looking to establish itself as a replacement for neobanks. These new age, digital-first financial platforms, offer quick banking services through mobile apps. They do not establish physical offices, do not offer complex services like mortgages, and often get into partnerships with traditional banks to offer services that require licences.
Kraken launched a platform called Krak in June this year – which is being seen as the entry point for the exchange into its next phase of development and growth.
“For 2026, there’s so much on the horizon. We’re really excited about Krack, the neobank replacement that we’ve launched. It’s so nice to see more regulators coming to the table talking with us, the more time we get to spend, the clearer crypto rules would be,” Greenbank noted.
xStocks take spotlight
Moving forward, the crypto giant is keen to build around xStocks – the tokenized versions of U.S. stocks and ETFs. Launched in mid-2025, these xStocks were recently made live on the TON blockchain by Kraken. As part of this service, over 60 tokenized equities were made live on platforms like Kraken, ByBit, and the Solana blockchain. On Kraken Pro, these stocks were available for trading 24/7 earlier in December.
Elaborating the portfolios of xStocks is among the primary focus areas for Kraken going into 2026. Greenberg told Coin Headlines that since being launched, xStocks have roped-in 80,000 users and clocked a volume of $12 billion.
“We plan to grow the current $200 million in assets to many, many billions and expand from ~70 available stocks to hundreds. We’re working with folks across the Solana ecosystem to make it easier to use your xStocks on platforms like Phantom and Jupiter and all sorts of different elements of the Solana ecosystem. The next set of things we’ll just continue down the liquidity side like money market funds,” Greenberg said.
Tokenization for yield
Kraken claims to be catering to 15 million registered users across multiple nations. Those who stake their assets on Kraken can churn rewards of up to 50 percent of the assets they choose to stake in the flexible model, as per official website. Those in the bonded staking model can earn rewards within the range of 0.01 percent to 22 percent.
Kraken, in a bid to get an edge over contemporaries like Coinbase and Binance, is chalking out ways to offer higher yields to its user base.
“We look forward to bringing yields, more yield options to Bitcoin, to stablecoins, all sorts of different stablecoins around the world, not just US dollar ones, but ones in all sorts of different currencies,” Greenberg added.
Tokenization of equities has emerged as a topic of interest for Kraken to explore in order to see how high the yield factors could go for the users.
“You all have a stock that is getting stocks, but what else do you see come within this whole tokenization world that you could say, what would you all be wanting to get on Kraken as well. The reason equities are the best place to start is they have the highest liquidity in the traditional markets. And so it should be the easiest to build highly liquid available markets on the crypto on the blockchain tokenization side. We’re not there yet. There’s a lot more work to be done,” he said.
Towards prediction markets?
Prediction markets are platforms that let users bet on the potential outcomes of future events. Kalshi and Polymarkets have been ruling the prediction market sector.
While platforms like Coinbase, Robinhood, PancakeSwap, Trust Wallet, and Phantom Wallet are among crypto mammoths which are now expanding into the prediction markets space.
Greenberg did not give a definitive response that hinted if Kraken is also looking to enter the space. He did, however, say that prediction markets can definitely be viewed as a natural extension of traditional trading – whether it is serious markets or fun ones like that of meme coins.
“Stay tuned,” Greenberg said, responding to the question if Kraken’s prediction markets foray is on the cards.
Kraken was founded in July 2011 and launched in 2013. The platform recently moved its headquarters to Cheyenne, Wyoming, from San Francisco, California.