Edit:
We can also guess they’re playing fractional reserve games with Monero.
The fact that they’re letting you deposit double what you can withdraw means they don’t have enough Monero on their books to make it up for everybody. Otherwise, the deposit and withdraw amounts would be equal.
Monero is private by default, and lacks ways to make exceptions to that privacy for governments. They don’t like that, because they want to spy on people’s finances, and have been both banning it directly and putting pressure on exchanges to get rid of it. For instance a few years ago the US government got Binance to delist it as part of the settlement terms of a lawsuit against them. Kraken is a US company and is the only centralized cryptocurrency exchange left that both offers Monero and will let you withdraw/deposit US dollars.
The text in the email says a lot:
These limits are being introduced as part of Kraken’s ongoing efforts to maintain risk-based compliance controls while continuing to support XMR trading and transfers.
Emphasis mine, they are doing it to try to keep the government happy, government does not like financial privacy.
The user can do things transparently if they want to in Monero, but it’s not by default, obviously.
We already have public view keys.
There are view keys, but that wasn’t considered to be enough when Binance was demanding more access to fulfill their new compliance requirements and other privacy coins were making changes to give it to them.
The fact that they’re letting you deposit double what you can withdraw means they don’t have enough Monero on their books to make it up for everybody. Otherwise, the deposit and withdraw amounts would be equal.
That conclusion does not follow from the limits alone. Deposit and withdrawal limits are operational policies, not a statement of the exchange’s Monero reserves. They can be asymmetric for many reasons, including compliance requirements, fraud prevention, or liquidity management.
A lower withdrawal limit might justify asking questions, but it is not evidence by itself that the platform is running a fractional-reserve scheme. To establish that, you would need information about its liabilities, on-chain reserves, withdrawal delays, failed withdrawals, or other evidence of a shortfall.
Let me guess you still gotta run random .deb files on your computer to access it? Even though Bisq was also open source and vetted and trusted?
Pass.
Excited for Serai though, if they ever actually do anything with it. Been like 7 years now.
