Kraken Futures to Expand Into Russia After New Hire

The London-based subsidiary currently offers bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, litecoin and XRP futures contracts and sees some $17 million in daily volume for the bitcoin futures alone.

"Russia is the most under-appreciated market in crypto today," said Kevin Beardsley, head of business development at Kraken Futures.

"The rapidly growing number of individual traders, combined with the increasing acceptance of trading cryptocurrency, represent clear, positive signals for the growth cryptocurrency futures trading in Russia."

"Cryptocurrency derivatives started attracting traders from the classic futures market in 2018, it grew in 2019 and trading experts expect the trend to continue in 2020," Bragin said.

The Russian expansion for Kraken will not involve spot trading or see any fiat on-ramps for the Russian ruble.

Crypto-to crypto futures trading is the safest way to enter the market, Beardsley said, as it presents "a relatively low risk of money laundering."

Russians are trading crypto derivatives quite actively, according to the Yakov Barinsky, CEO of HASH CIB, a crypto asset management firm that actively trades derivatives itself.

Barinsky said between 10 percent and 15 percent of the trading volume on the most popular crypto derivatives exchanges like BitMEX, Deribit and Kraken comes from Russian traders, most of whom are professionals.

Russian traders might be bringing in from $4 million of trades on Kraken to some $230 million on BitMEX in bitcoin futures trade.

Kraken will face some serious competition in Russia, Barinsky said, adding, "After Binance Futures was launched, liquidity started moving to it and we expect that it's going to exceed others by trading volume this year."