Kraken Buys AI Trading Platform Capitalise

Cryptocurrency platform Kraken has acquired Israeli trading automation firm Capitalise.ai.

“Founded in 2015, Capitalise.ai developed a natural-language platform that transforms everyday text into executable trading strategies,” Kraken said in a news release Wednesday (Aug. 20).

“Its proprietary language model and big data infrastructure can ingest real-time and historical data across equities, crypto, FX, futures, options and more.”

According to the release, a phased rollout of Capitalise.ai’s functionality within Kraken Pro is set to kick off later in the year. As the Pro platform has advanced, making use of its features increasingly means needing technical skill and deep trading expertise, Kraken said.

“Capitalise.ai removes that barrier—enabling users of all backgrounds to design, test, and automate complex strategies using simple, everyday language,” the news release added. “By integrating Capitalise.ai’s technology into Kraken Pro, users will soon be able to automate sophisticated strategies across digital and traditional asset classes—without writing a single line of code.”

Kraken says Capitalise’s tech has been used by a number of trad-fi brokers and exchanges with compelling results. The company’s co-founders, CEO Amir Shiovich and CPO Shahar Rabin, will be joining Kraken, along with “key product and engineering talent.”

“Kraken is in build mode,” the company said in its second-quarter financial highlights released last month. “We are creating a multi-asset platform that enables anyone to trade anything, anytime, anywhere.”

The company had, in that quarter, introduced a Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)-regulated crypto futures suite for professionals in Europe and a regulated U.S. derivatives offering for American users.

For institutional clients, the company introduced a full-service prime brokerage called Kraken Prime, rolled out reward-bearing USDG and custody support for SOL and XRP on Kraken Custody, and debuted a white-label crypto-as-a-service solution called Kraken Embed.

In other crypto news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about efforts by a group of global financial trade associations to get the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) to reconsider the Crypto Asset Exposure Standard (SCO60) before it goes into effect next year.

The associations said in a Tuesday (Aug. 19) letter to the BCBS that the standard’s capital treatment of crypto assets is excessively conservative and overly punitive.

They also argue the standard is out of line with actual risks and inconsistent with current market risk management practices.

Along with the letter, the associations issued a report spotlighting the “transformative potential” of distributed ledger technology in capital markets.