Kraken will stop taking new orders on 176 of its native spot trading pairs on Friday 6 November at 14:00 UTC, cancel whatever orders are still open over the following days and replace those markets with Kraken synthetic pairs, according to a notice on Kraken’s status page posted on 27 October at 06:19 UTC. The coins stay listed and balances are not touched. What changes is how a trade on those pairs is built, and what it costs.
A synthetic pair has no order book of its own. Kraken fills it by trading two of its liquid markets at the same moment, usually two dollar pairs. Every order on such a pair pays a taker fee, limit orders included, and a limit order is all or nothing: it never sits in a book and cannot be partly filled.
Europe takes most of the change. Of the 176 pairs, 140 are quoted in euros, a count first reported by TokenPost on 28 October and confirmed by the list Kraken published in its Support Center, last updated on 26 October. Almost all of them are smaller tokens against the euro, from CRO/EUR and DYDX/EUR to FLOKI/EUR and YFI/EUR. BTC/EUR and ETH/EUR are not on the list.
Kraken synthetic pairs timeline: cancel-only from 6 November at 14:00 UTC
The step that matters for anyone with an open order comes first. At 14:00 UTC on 6 November, which is 15:00 in Paris, Rome or Berlin and 9:00 in New York, the affected pairs switch to cancel-only mode: existing orders can be cancelled, new ones are refused.
| Date (2026) | What happens, per Kraken’s notice and pair list |
|---|---|
| 27 October, 06:19 UTC | Notice published on status.kraken.com |
| 6 November, 14:00 UTC | 176 native pairs go to cancel-only: no new orders, existing ones can still be cancelled |
| 6 to 9 November | Kraken cancels the remaining open orders and delists the native pairs |
| 9 November, end of day | Replacement synthetic pairs listed |
| 10 November, 22:59 to 23:59 UTC | Scheduled window shown on the same status page |
The last two lines do not match. The notice and the Support Center list both date the synthetic replacements to the end of 9 November, with no hour, while the status page files the event as a scheduled window on 10 November from 22:59 to 23:59 UTC. Kraken does not explain the gap.
Nothing moves across automatically. “Open orders do not carry over to the synthetic pairs,” the Support Center page says. Orders still open after 14:00 UTC on 6 November are cancelled by Kraken, and a client with no open order on those pairs has nothing to do.
What a synthetic pair is: two dollar order books traded at once
Kraken launched synthetic pairs on Kraken Pro in March. Its blog post of 23 March 2026 described more than 10,000 of them, built on 478 USD spot pairs and priced in 21 quote assets: three fiat currencies (the pound, the Australian dollar and the euro), eight stablecoins and tokens such as USDT, USDC, EURC and the gold-backed PAXG, and ten crypto assets including BTC, ETH, SOL and XRP. Native pairs, the ones with their own order book, number fewer than 1,000 and are mostly quoted in dollars or euros, according to the support article.
The mechanism, as Kraken’s support article on synthetic pairs describes it, works through a shared currency. Take DOGE/SOL, which has no book of its own. Buying DOGE with SOL means buying DOGE on the DOGE/USD market and selling SOL on the SOL/USD market, sized in dollars, with both legs executed together inside the matching engine. The trade history shows one trade, DOGE against SOL, at the effective cross rate.
Kraken gives a worked example. With DOGE/USD offered at $0.20 and SOL/USD bid at $200, 1,000 DOGE costs $200, which is 1 SOL. A fee of 10 basis points adds 0.001 SOL, so the buyer pays 1.001 SOL. The 10 basis points are an illustration, not a rate from Kraken’s fee schedule.
The spread a trader pays is the sum of the two underlying spreads, with no markup from Kraken. Market data for a synthetic pair is approximate, since it is derived from the two books, and Kraken Pro marks these markets with an “S” badge on the web and in the mobile app.
Limit orders lose resting, partial fills and post-only
On a native pair, a limit order sits in the order book at its price until someone trades against it. It can be filled in pieces, flagged post-only so that it never takes liquidity, or given a time-in-force instruction.
None of that survives on a synthetic pair. Kraken does not post the limit order anywhere. It watches the two underlying books and fills the order when both legs offer enough depth at the limit price or better. The fill is all or nothing. Only market and limit orders exist, with no post-only and no time-in-force, per the support article.
A large limit order on one of the 176 pairs may therefore wait longer than it used to, or not fill at all, because both books must carry the full size at the right price at the same moment. Someone who built a position bit by bit with one resting order would now have to split it into several smaller orders.
Market orders change less. They execute at once against the best prices on both books, and Kraken applies the same Market Price Protection threshold as on the base asset’s native pair. On a thin cross, a market order can still move the price, the slippage any taker accepts.
A taker fee even on a limit order
Every synthetic trade pays one taker fee from Kraken’s spot fee schedule, whatever the order type. A trader who placed limit orders on a native book to pay the lower maker fee loses that option on the pairs that switch. Kraken’s documents give no synthetic rate by volume tier, only the 10 basis point example.
Kraken’s argument is that this single fee is lower than paying for the same conversion as two separate trades through dollars. That comparison fits someone crossing between two assets with no direct market. For someone who traded a native euro pair as a maker, the comparison is a different one.
On price, Kraken says the combined spread of two deep dollar books is often tighter than the spread of a thin native book, especially for niche assets, and accepts that a high-volume pair with a deep native book may give the better price.
Why euro traders are the most exposed
With 140 euro pairs out of 176, the clients who will see a difference are mostly those who buy and sell smaller tokens directly against euros on Kraken. The other 36 pairs are spread thin: ten against USDT, six against USDC, five against the pound, four each against BTC and the yen, three against the Australian dollar, two against DAI, one against ETH and one, SOL/EURC, against the euro stablecoin.
Kraken’s March blog lists the euro among the quote currencies priced via USD. Read with the support article, that suggests a synthetic token/EUR order would be built from two legs running through dollars: the token against USD and the euro against USD. Kraken does not spell this out for the pairs being moved, so this is our reading of its documentation. If it holds, a euro trader pays the spread of the dollar token market plus the spread of the euro-dollar leg, under one taker fee.
Regional rules do not change with the format. “Synthetic pairs do not bypass regional or regulatory restrictions,” the support article says: an asset that is not available in a client’s region stays unavailable through a synthetic pair. Kraken keeps different asset lists by region; on 24 October, for instance, it kept Monero listed but not for clients in the EU. The March blog also said synthetic pairs were not yet available in Canada.
No source we found says anything specific to the United States or to MiCA about this migration. Neither the French AMF nor Italy’s Consob or OAM has commented.
The move runs the other way from a recent change at a rival. OKX said it would put euros and EURC in one order book for EEA users, as Coindaro reported on 23 October, deepening a euro market. Kraken is removing euro books and routing those trades through dollar markets.
What to do before Friday 6 November at 14:00 UTC
For a client with open orders on one of the affected pairs, the notice and the Support Center page give these steps:
- Check open orders against the list of 176 pairs on Kraken’s Support Center page, including old limit orders that may have been forgotten.
- Cancel those orders before 14:00 UTC on 6 November (15:00 in Paris and Rome). After that, cancelling still works, but no new order can be placed on those pairs.
- Keep a note of the price and size of each cancelled order if it is to be placed again, since nothing is transferred to the synthetic market.
- Once the synthetic pair is listed, which Kraken dates to the end of 9 November, new orders go there. It carries the “S” badge, and limit orders on it pay the taker fee and fill only in full.
- Where the same token also trades on a native pair that is not moving, such as its dollar market, the cost of a maker order there and a taker order on the synthetic pair can be compared, spreads included.
Bots and API users have one more check. Neither the notice, the pair list nor the support article says whether the REST and WebSocket APIs list synthetic pairs or how they name them, so a script trading the affected pairs needs testing before 6 November.
What Kraken has not said
Kraken gives no reason for the change and does not say how it chose these 176 pairs. Its argument that synthetic spreads can beat thin native books is about synthetic pairs as a product, not about this migration. Several practical points are also open as of 28 October:
- The taker fee rate that applies to synthetic trades at each volume tier.
- The exact time the replacement pairs go live: the end of 9 November in the notice, or the 10 November window on the status page.
- Whether the change covers only Kraken Pro, where the support article places synthetic pairs, or also the simpler Kraken app.
- How API clients are handled.
Kraken has cleared pairs this way before
The procedure is not new. According to a support notice on spot pair removals, Kraken put a set of pairs in cancel-only mode on 4 April 2024 at about 10:00 UTC, then cancelled all open orders and stopped trading on them on 5 April at about 10:00 UTC. Those markets, such as REP/BTC and MANA/ETH, disappeared. This time the markets come back, in a format with different rules.
For readers newer to exchanges, the change turns on two terms. An order book is the list of buy and sell orders waiting at each price on a market; a maker adds an order to that list and a taker trades against what is already there, which is why exchanges usually charge takers more. Our guide to how a centralized exchange works covers the basics, and our Kraken review lists the exchange’s fees, products and licences.
As of 28 October at 18:30 UTC, the status notice carried no update since it was posted, and the pair list was last revised on 26 October.