Who is Jesse Powell? Kraken co-founder and chairman

Jesse Powell is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Kraken in 2011, a US-based platform for trading and custody of crypto assets that opened to customers in 2013. He ran it as chief executive until he announced his succession in 2022 and has chaired its board since. Before Kraken he sold virtual items for online games, and that business is what led him to notice bitcoin.

His career is best explained by what he learned in Tokyo in 2011, when he helped Mt. Gox recover from an attack: bitcoin's weak point was not the protocol but the companies holding users' money. Kraken was founded as an alternative to that exchange and built on controls a third party can check, such as its 2014 proof of reserves and a Wyoming bank charter in 2020. The combative style with which Powell has defended that view also explains his clashes with regulators and with part of his own staff.

Who is Jesse Powell?

Powell is co-founder and chairman of Kraken, whose parent company is Payward, Inc. He announced he would step down as chief executive on 21 September 2022, according to The Block, and the handover was completed in April 2023, when Dave Ripley took charge, according to the Kraken blog. The company now has a shared leadership, with Arjun Sethi listed as co-CEO of Payward and Kraken by CoinDesk.

Outside Kraken, Powell is known for his political views, which he posts frequently on social media. In a March 2025 interview with Fortune, he said he had donated a million dollars to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, describing him as the candidate who had kept his promises to the crypto industry. The same piece notes his role as an arts patron: in 2008 he founded the Verge Center for the Arts in Sacramento, a non-profit devoted to contemporary art.

Education and first companies

Powell grew up in Stockton, a city in California's Central Valley, in a family that at times relied on welfare and food stamps, according to the Fortune profile. He studied philosophy at California State University, Sacramento, and names Aristotle and Ayn Rand among the thinkers he admires. Some profiles credit him with a degree, but in a 2014 interview with Bloomberg, republished by American Banker, he said he left university in 2003 to run his company; we follow that account, as it is the most direct.

That company was Lewt, which he had founded in 2001 to buy and sell virtual items from online games. The business taught him how in-game currencies work and how they are exchanged for real money, and Powell credits that interest with the moment he noticed bitcoin. When Kraken was announced in 2011, its founding post described him as an entrepreneur who had worked in the virtual goods industry since 2001.

Mt. Gox and the origins of Kraken

In June 2011, Mt. Gox, the exchange created by Jed McCaleb and then run by Mark Karpelès, was hacked. Powell flew to Tokyo at short notice and spent about two weeks there. According to American Banker, he handled day-to-day operations, drafted press releases and hired and trained staff while Karpelès worked on restoring the service.

What he saw led him to start his own platform. Kraken was incorporated on 28 July 2011, according to its blog, with the stated aim of building a professional exchange. Powell later explained that exchanges were the most critical piece of the ecosystem and that he wanted an alternative to exist if Mt. Gox failed. Opening took two years: FinCEN's March 2013 guidance on virtual currencies delayed the launch by about six months, and Kraken began trading on 10 September 2013 with euros, bitcoin and litecoin, according to CoinDesk. Mt. Gox shut down in February 2014 after the theft of around 470 million dollars, and Kraken's user base grew by 50% in the following two months, according to the 2014 interview.

Kraken's proof of reserves

Kraken is a centralised platform: customers deposit money and crypto assets, the company holds them and matches buy and sell orders in its own systems, off-chain. It is the custodial wallet model shared by Coinbase, the company of Brian Armstrong, or Binance, and it carries the risk Mt. Gox exposed: customers depend on the company actually holding the assets their balances show.

Kraken's answer was proof of reserves. In March 2014, a month after Mt. Gox closed, developer Stefan Thomas verified that Kraken's bitcoin exceeded what the company owed its customers, according to CoinDesk. The method combines two checks. Kraken supplied the list of its addresses, whose balances the auditor compared against the blockchain, and the customers' anonymised balances were grouped into a Merkle tree, so that each customer can verify their balance is included in the total without seeing anyone else's.

The scope of that first proof was limited. It covered only bitcoin, reflected a single moment and required trust in the auditor, as Thomas himself acknowledged. Nor could it show that the company had no other debts. Kraken continued down the regulated route: on 16 September 2020, Wyoming approved its subsidiary Kraken Financial as a special purpose depository institution, a state bank charter designed for digital asset companies, according to Finextra.

Kraken and the SEC

Kraken's relationship with the US securities regulator shaped Powell's last years as chief executive and his successors' first. On 9 February 2023, Kraken agreed to pay 30 million dollars and stop offering its staking programme in the United States, which the SEC treated as an unregistered securities offering, without admitting or denying the allegations, according to the SEC's announcement. On 20 November 2023, the SEC sued Kraken for operating as an exchange, broker and clearing agency without registering and for commingling customer funds with its own.

Kraken argued that the lawsuit misrepresented its business model and never had merit, and in March 2025 it announced that the SEC had agreed to drop it, according to CoinDesk. On 27 March 2025, the SEC and Kraken filed a stipulation dismissing the case with prejudice, with no penalty or admission of wrongdoing, according to the SEC release.

Jesse Powell today

Powell's departure as chief executive had a reason he explained himself years later. In March 2023, the FBI searched his Los Angeles home and seized his electronic devices in an investigation prompted by a complaint from the Verge Center for the Arts, which accused him of interfering with its computer accounts and blocking its access to email, according to The Block. Powell denied the accusations and was never charged. In July 2025 the Justice Department closed the investigation and returned his devices, according to Fortune. In the March 2025 interview, Powell said he stepped down to protect Kraken from regulatory pressure after learning he was under investigation. He continues a civil lawsuit against members of Verge's board.

His leadership style had already drawn controversy in 2022, when The New York Times published a profile focused on his comments to Kraken staff challenging progressive views on pronouns and gender, as Fortune recalled in 2025. Meanwhile, Kraken is preparing to go public. Payward confidentially submitted a draft prospectus to the SEC in November 2025, after raising 800 million dollars at a 20 billion dollar valuation; in March 2026 it froze the process and, according to CoinDesk, it no longer plans to list before the second quarter of 2027.

What is Jesse Powell's net worth?

Neither Forbes nor Bloomberg publishes an estimate of Jesse Powell's net worth as of 10 November 2026, and Forbes does not include him on its billionaires list. His wealth depends mainly on his stake in Payward, a private company that has not disclosed its shareholder structure, and on personal crypto holdings Powell has not documented. Figures circulating on biography websites cite no verifiable source, so we do not repeat them.

What is public is the company's value. Payward was valued at 20 billion dollars in its November 2025 round, and Deutsche Börse's purchase of 1.5% of its equity for 200 million dollars, announced on 14 April 2026, implied around 13.3 billion, according to The Block. If the listing goes ahead, the prospectus will have to disclose the holdings of directors and principal shareholders, and it will be the first documented basis for estimating his net worth.

Jesse Powell's contribution: custody that can be checked

Powell's contribution lies in treating custody as the industry's central problem. In March 2014 Kraken published a proof of reserves that any customer could check against their own balance, when the market had just lost the funds deposited at Mt. Gox, and it later sought licences that placed it under banking supervision. That approach starts from a principle the industry shares, user control over their own assets, and carries it into a company that by definition holds other people's assets.

The limit lies in what a proof of reserves cannot show: it reflects a single moment and does not rule out hidden liabilities, so customers still depend on the company's solvency and controls. The other tension is personal. Kraken's identity has been so closely tied to Powell's public positions that, by his own account, he had to step aside so that the FBI investigation would not affect the company. The listing will test whether Kraken can sustain that approach to custody with governance less dependent on its founder.