Kraken Bitcoin Exchange trading back online after major system update

Kraken bitcoin exchange has announced that trading is now back after completing its planned upgrade to mitigate issues with server overload. For some users, they will be welcomed back with zero fees, those using unleveraged trades will be charged 0% until January 31, 2018.

In the first moments after getting its trading engine back online, the development team noted that “all orders appear to be filling in and executing as expected.” From the latest updates, Kraken next proceeded to pause the exchange again to investigate issues with order book data not being displayed properly.

The company planned this major upgrade right before the end of the year.

All client funds were kept safe and secure during the course of the updates. See below notes of some important information resulting from the event:

Trading

• All orders have been canceled prior to trading resuming
• Trading pairs launched with no orders on the books
• All funds in previously open orders have been returned to users available balances
• Margin positions will remain open
• Margin liquidations will be paused for at least 48 hours
• Creation of new margin positions is disabled for at least 48 hours
• Caution: Clients should be extremely careful with market orders and double-check limit order prices in an illiquid market

Funding

• Withdrawals are now disabled and will remain disabled for a minimum of 12 hours (during this time Kraken will be monitoring the new system for anomalies)
• For fiat or crypto deposits (initiated before, during or following the downtime) users need to allow up to 2 additional business days for funds to be credited

Fees

• All unleveraged trades will be charged zero until January 31, 2018 (UTC)
• Margin position, open, and rollover fees are reduced to 0.005% until January 31, 2018 (UTC)

New Accounts and Tier Upgrades

• Verifications of new accounts will be delayed says Kraken, with this being lowest priority at the moment until they are sure the new upgrades have been settled
• Tier upgrades of existing accounts will have priority above new accounts

Regarding the poor conditions the company left users with, the team left the following message: 

“We apologize for the uncertainty our downtime has caused. The scheduled downtime was to replace our old trading engine with a brand new trading engine – an improvement that customers have long asked for and that we have long been working hard on. We still have some more work to do before the new trading engine is as good as we want it to be, but this week’s replacement was an important first step to having a better trading experience. Our system is replicated in development, where all tests passed.”

“However, when the new engine was moved to the production environment, regression tests picked up a condition that proved quite difficult to track down. Further insight into the downtime and a description of actions we plan to take in order to improve the client experience will be provided via a retrospective Kraken blog post, to be published in the coming days. With trading now resumed, the engine’s performance will be closely monitored. The site will come down if needed, which may occur with little to no notice. Please continue to refer to status.kraken.com for real-time updates and important announcements over the next few days.”