تسعى شركة Kraken إلى الحصول على حكم نهائي بعد حصولها على جائزة بقيمة 22 مليون دولار ضد مدقق حسابات سابق

Bitcoin Magazine Kraken Seeks Final Judgment After $22 Million Award Against Former Auditor Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, has asked the Delaware Court of Chancery to enter a final judgment against its former auditor, Mazars USA, after an arbitrator awarded the firm $22 million. The exchange disclosed the request on July 7 through an open letter from co-CEO Arjun Sethi and a series of posts from CEO Dave Ripley. The dispute traces to December 2023, when Mazars withdrew from Kraken’s 2022 audit days before its completion. Mazars had audited Kraken for three prior years and issued two clean opinions, according to the company. In writing, Sethi said, the auditor confirmed it had no disagreement with management, no concerns about the firm’s integrity, and no findings of fraud. Mazars attributed its resignation to legal developments, among them a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission had filed against Kraken weeks before. That SEC complaint was dismissed with prejudice, with no penalties and no admission of wrongdoing. Kraken said the abandoned audit cost it years and millions of dollars in legal fees to secure new auditors and reassure banks, regulators, and counterparties. The exchange said it has received a clean audit in each year that followed. The letters come as Kraken pursues a full European banking license, reportedly through Lithuania, a move that would allow the company to offer traditional banking services across the European Economic Area and potentially become the first cryptocurrency exchange to secure a full European bank license, according to CoinDesk reporting. The effort is part of Kraken’s broader regulatory strategy as it expands beyond crypto into mainstream financial services, building on milestones including U.S. Federal Reserve payment access and authorization in the UAE. Operation Chokepoint 2.0 Sethi placed the episode within what critics call Operation Chokepoint 2.0 , a term for what they describe as a coordinated effort by regulators to cut lawful crypto firms off from banking and other services. In December 2022, a year before quitting the Kraken audit, Mazars Group halted proof-of-reserves work for the crypto sector and removed those reports from its website. The letter cited a chain of actions from 2022 and 2023. On January 3, 2023, the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and OCC issued a joint statement warning that crypto business models raised safety and soundness concerns for banks. Documents released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showed the FDIC sent at least 25 letters to two dozen banks urging them to pause or refrain from expanding crypto activity. The SEC’s SAB 121 accounting guidance required public companies holding crypto to record those assets on their balance sheets, a step that made custody uneconomical for banks. The Federal Reserve denied a master account to Custodia, a Wyoming bank built for digital assets. And in March 2023, the payment networks run by S