The post Kraken’s surprise Fed win may harken onslaught of crypto firms with narrow Fed access appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

The crypto industry keeps knocking down the barriers into the core U.S. financial system, and digital assets exchange Kraken’s approval for a limited Federal Reserve account marked another such milestone that analysts think could be the first of a trend. The crypto arrival inside the Fed payment system — provisional and limited though it is — has aggravated the traditional banks and injected some confusion in the Fed’s ongoing effort to write policies for how crypto firms are supposed to go about getting limited “skinny” master accounts. But Kraken’s Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said that this development represents “what it looks like when crypto infrastructure matures into core financial infrastructure.” Kraken’s Wyoming-chartered banking arm, Payward Financial, is granted a year of access to a “limited purpose” account as a “Tier 3” entrant, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, one of a dozen regional banks in the Federal Reserve system. “We see this as the first of many Federal Reserve approvals for crypto entities to obtain master accounts, which gives them direct access to the central bank payment rails including Fed Wire,” said Jaret Sieburg, a Washington policy analyst at TD Cowen, in a client note on Thursday. “Crypto entity access to master accounts was inevitable under President [Donald] Trump, given his support for the crypto sector. We expect additional announcements in the coming months.” Ian Katz, an analyst who tracks federal financial policies at Capital Alpha in Washington, echoed that sentiment. “The Fed’s decision could open the doors for other crypto operations including Circle, Anchorage and Custodia, a Wyoming-based firm that has unsuccessfully sued the Fed over the right to have a master account,” he noted. What does direct access to the Fed payments systems mean for Kraken?Potentially, according to Sethi: instant “settlement between fiat and crypto, institutional-grade…

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Filed under: News - @ March 6, 2026 3:26 am