Kraken has withdrawn the questionnaires it emailed to customers who bought Monero (XMR) and then moved it off the exchange, co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in a post on X late on Friday 23 October. The emails asked those clients for their employer, the source of their funds and what they planned to do with the coins. Sethi wrote that “no rule required it”, that XMR stays listed on Kraken and that checks on where money comes from will continue, according to The Defiant’s report of the post.
The Kraken Monero reversal matters only where the coin is still on offer. For clients in Paris, Milan or Dublin nothing changes: Kraken stopped XMR trading and deposits across the European Economic Area on 31 October 2024, and from 10 July 2027 the EU’s anti-money-laundering regulation bars crypto firms from running accounts that allow anonymity-enhancing coins.
Kraken asked Monero buyers who they work for and what the coins were for
In his post, as reported by The Defiant, Sethi said the emails went to customers who had bought XMR with their own money and then withdrawn it. They were asked who employs them, where the money came from and what they intended to do with the Monero once it had left Kraken.
No law was behind it, he said. According to The Defiant’s summary, Sethi traced the questions to a choice to see a young client holding a lot of money as a warning sign, and he disagreed with that choice. The post, as reported, does not say which team made it.
“those requests are withdrawn and the clients have been told nothing is required of them,” he wrote. The Defiant reproduces his words in lower case.
The line he drew is narrow. “where your money came from is a fair question. what you do with it after it leaves is not,” Sethi wrote, and he called the intended-use question unacceptable. On the listing itself he was blunt: “xmr stays listed. buy it here, take it home.”
What Kraken has not disclosed
Sethi did not say how many clients received the emails, nor where they live. Nothing public says when the questionnaires started, whether any account was limited for not answering, or whether a regulator had raised Monero withdrawals with Kraken. His statement does not say either whether it covers every region where Kraken operates.
Coindaro found no Kraken blog post or support article about the questionnaires on Saturday morning. We could not open the X post itself, so the wording quoted here is the one carried by The Defiant’s article.
The source-of-funds check stays in Kraken’s rules
Dropping one question does not end the reviews. Kraken’s source-of-funds policy, as described by The Defiant, lets the exchange ask for documents that show how a customer built their wealth or where the money for a given transaction came from, and it cites anti-money-laundering requirements for doing so.
A separate policy on information requests, updated on 1 October, says a review can be set off by routine checks or by account activity, including the size or type of a transaction. If a client ignores such a request, trading and deposits may be paused. Withdrawals are not affected under that policy.
So a Kraken client who buys XMR can still be asked to prove where the dollars came from. Sethi has ruled out only the follow-up about what happens to the coins once they reach a private wallet. Our Monero page explains how the coin hides amounts and addresses on its chain.
Kraken Monero withdrawal limits: $1,500 a month for individuals
The questionnaires sit alongside hard caps. Kraken’s support page on deposit and withdrawal limits, last updated on 3 September 2026, says monthly limits on XMR deposits and withdrawals apply from 15 August 2026, counted over a rolling 30 days. An individual account can deposit up to $3,500 of XMR and withdraw up to $1,500. A corporate account gets $30,000 and $10,000.
Kraken presents the caps as risk-based compliance controls that let it keep supporting XMR trading and transfers. For other coins the same page says crypto deposits are unlimited. Sethi’s post, as reported, does not mention the caps, and the page still listed them on Saturday morning.
Is Monero on Kraken? Not in the EEA, the UK, Canada or Australia
“XMR stays listed” holds only where Kraken still offers it. Late on Friday, US Eastern time, Kraken’s public trading API showed the XMR/USD market as online and its status page listed Monero funding as operational, The Defiant reported.
Kraken’s own pages list the exceptions. Ireland and Belgium went first, in a notice that gives no reason. The EEA-wide delisting followed in the autumn of 2024; Kraken’s support page on Monero in Europe says it had no choice because of regulatory changes. In the UK, a conversion FAQ says Kraken’s British entity does not support XMR exchange or custody. For Canada, the delisting notice, last updated on 19 October 2026, cites compliance requirements in the country, and Kraken’s Australia FAQ names Monero, with Dash and Zcash, as coins its Australian clients cannot buy.
| Clients in | What Kraken changed for XMR | Date |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | XMR support ended in 2021 (Decrypt); later, withdrawals halted and leftover balances converted to BTC, as Kraken’s UK entity does not offer XMR exchange or custody | Conversion on 30 July 2024 |
| Ireland and Belgium | Trading and deposits halted; withdrawals halted a month later and leftover XMR converted to BTC | 10 May 2024, then 10 June 2024 |
| European Economic Area | Trading and deposits stopped at 15:00 UTC; withdrawals open until 31 December 2024, then leftover XMR converted to BTC and paid out by 6 January 2025 | 31 October 2024 |
| Canada | Deposits suspended, trading disabled on every XMR pair, accounts withdrawal-only for XMR | 2 September 2025 |
| Australia | Monero listed as an exception among the coins Australian clients can buy and sell | No start date given (FAQ updated 10 December 2025) |
For French and Italian clients, Sethi’s post does not bring XMR back. Our Kraken review lists what the exchange offers EEA clients. The delisting notices cover XMR balances held on Kraken, not coins already sitting in a personal wallet.
Binance left Monero before Kraken’s European exit
Kraken is not the first large exchange to step back from Monero. Binance delisted XMR on 20 February 2024 after announcing the move on 10 February, Decrypt reported. It gave no detailed reason beyond saying it reviews listed assets and may drop one when conditions change. In 2023 Binance had announced, then dropped a month later, a plan to delist privacy coins in the EU, according to the same report, which also noted that some users had trouble withdrawing XMR before the cut-off.
Decrypt also recalled that OKX had announced in late 2023 that it would remove XMR from its trading pairs in early January 2024. Of the large exchanges Coindaro reviews, Kraken is now the only one still listing XMR, and only for clients outside the regions in the table above.
EU anonymous-account ban applies from 10 July 2027
The European deadline sits in Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, the Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), published in the EU Official Journal on 19 June 2024. Its Article 79 forbids credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto-asset service providers from keeping anonymous accounts, including anonymous crypto-asset accounts and any account that allows the holder to be anonymised or transactions to be obscured, anonymity-enhancing coins included. Existing accounts of that kind must go through customer due diligence before they can be used again.
The rules apply from 10 July 2027 for most firms; football clubs and agents, also covered by the regulation, get until 10 July 2029. The text is addressed to providers: it does not ban individuals from holding Monero in self-custody. Our AMLR deadline page tracks the date, and the MiCA guide explains the licensing regime under which EU exchanges such as Kraken already operate.
Still open: how many clients got the emails, in which countries, and whether Kraken rewrites its information-request policy to match what its co-CEO has now said. The XMR withdrawal cap of $1,500 a month stays on Kraken’s support pages for now.