There hasn’t been a lot of good news lately for ripple (XRP) or crypto in general. I, like many others, jumped at the opportunity to trade meaningless and worthless digital tokens with the hopes of making some money doing it. I feel like I got what I wanted out of crypto and the party is over for now. I never had faith this was going anywhere, but I know a good opportunity when I see one. I am still in the red with Ripple and Doge coin, but I am patient and I can wait. Recently there has been nothing but bad press and worrisome headlines coming out for both Coinbase and Gemini. I was signed up with them until recently and decided to move all of my tokens over to Kraken. I am not advising anyone use Kraken, I just chose it because it is the only other exchange I know of that has been around as long as Coinbase and Gemini. The other reason I chose Kraken is because I remember hearing that they still let you trade Ripple and when I checked their website’s landing page it presented itself as much. Well… I wouldn’t be writing this unless something went wrong.
Gotcha
Kraken does not allow US residents to trade ripple. Frankly I don’t care why, it’s just now allowed. They do very little to explain this to you on their landing page and finding the exact text where it explicitly says you cannot trade XRP in the USA is incredibly buried. To their credit, the only place where I found a blurb for this is on their “Sell XRP” landing page, but that’s not the landing page I found first. The words “misleading” and “liar” come to mind. There is always going to be that person who will say, “Didn’t you see it on their blog?”. I will just answer that now, “No, I don’t read crypto exchange blogs.”
How this is misleading
Doing a basic search in Google gives you the following:
You would think results might pop up indicating that you can’t trade XRP in the united states on Kraken. Nope. In order to find that you need to search for “kraken ripple xrp sell us prohibited” and still the first thing to pop up is an advertisement for buying ripple and underneath it an article from Yahoo Finance indicating you cannot trade XRP on Kraken. Thanks Kraken…
Kraken’s XRP landing pages
Well naturally, not expecting to be hoodwinked I was lured into the landing page which says “Exchange Ripple” which to me means buy or sell. This unfortunately sent me to the “buy ripple” landing page.
https://www.kraken.com/lp/buy-ripple
No where on this page does it indicate that I cannot buy or sell ripple in the United States. It’s like, this is the one time a website conveniently doesn’t want my location?
Oh but wait… if we go to the sell ripple landing page the message is different all of a sudden…
How convenient…
Speaking with Kraken support
I had an irritating conversation with Kraken support who was trying to gaslight me into believing that US Dollars are a universal unit and that just because they mention dollars on their website doesn’t mean that people in the United States are allowed to participate. The following is my conversation with Kraken support, but I have redacted the bits that are sensitive info for me. Besides complaining at them I needed them to help guide me on how to get verified since their documentation is not up to date.
Conclusion
So yeah… you cannot trade XRP on Ripple using US Dollars ($) if you are a United States citizen. Very very clearly communicated by Kraken here in this buried and hard to find snippet of information located on this page.
I moved all of my stuff to Kraken, so I am just going to wait for the SEC to lick their wounds after basically losing their battle with XRP. It’s unfortunately still pending a judgement, but the sentiment I got was that the SEC lost this case. It would be nice to offload these useless tokens finally.