Kraken's dispute with the former auditing agency Mazars USA entered the litigation stage. According to court documents, the Kraken parent company Payward was seeking to enforce a $22 million confidential arbitral award on the grounds that Mazars, after withdrawing from the audit in 2023, had affected the progress of the exchange in obtaining state-level remittance plates.

The arbitral award points to the blocking of the license plate.

Business Insider cited the deleted arbitration document as stating that the arbitrator was a retired judge. In his ruling, he noted that the withdrawal of Mazars had brought a “licensed crisis” to Kraken and had a direct impact on the process of applying for multiple state transfer plates.

The court materials show that Mazars stopped working for Kraken at the end of 2023, only days before the completion of Kraken 2022's financial year audit. At that time, Kraken was under investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, and was under pressure for late submission of audit material requested by state regulators.

The $22 million award includes acquisition costs

Part of the compensation in the arbitral award relates to Kraken ' s acquisition of TradeStation Crystal. The document shows that this amount amounts to $12.5 million. CoinDesk previously reported that one of the reasons Kraken acquired the business was to see its existing regulatory licence plates.

  • Total arbitral award $22 million
  • Of which $12.5 million relates to acquisition costs
  • Mazars stopped the audit at the end of 2023

In the document, the arbitrator wrote that Mazars had been “confident” in his treatment, but that was not sufficient to exonerate him from liability. At the same time, he mentioned that Kraken had experienced a rapid expansion of operations at the time, but that accounting processes and the level of automation were lagging behind, which had complicated the audit work.

The SEC litigation has increased the pressure on the audit.

According to court documents, Mazars received summonses from the Grand Jury and the SEC in 2023 requesting documents relating to Kraken. The arbitration decision also referred to the fact that one month after the SEC sued Kraken, Mazars had suspended the audit work in question and that some of the elements cited in the indictment appeared to relate to representations or findings in the Mazars audit final.

Arjun Sethi, Co-Executive Director of Kraken, stated to Business Insider that the withdrawal of the auditing body without finding a company problem left the company with an additional compliance burden, and Kraken spent several years and millions of dollars on related issues.

The SEC withdrew its action against Kraken in March 2025. It was reported that the United States Government ' s regulatory attitude towards the encryption industry had been relaxed after Trump ' s second term of office.

Additional information:Forvis Mazars is currently the tenth largest auditing agency in the United States. The aim of the action was not to re-arbitrate, but to require the court to enforce an arbitration award previously made.