Kraken's parent won $22 million against the auditing agency Mazars. Disarm

On 8 July, the Kraken parent company Payward won arbitration with the former auditing agency Mazars USA, and the arbitrator ruled that Mazars had to pay Payward $22 million. Payward is currently in the process of seeking confirmation of the arbitral award and a final judgement from the Telwart Court of Justice. The dispute originated at the peak of “Operation Choke Point 2.0” in 2022. According to Payward, Mazars suddenly withdrew from a near-completed audit of Kraken and did not find any problems with the company, but this caused reputational damage to Kraken and forced it to spend years and significant legal costs to clarify itself. Payward Co-Chair CEO Arjun Sethi stated that the audit was not “bentness” for the encryption company, but was a key infrastructure for maintaining banking relations, licence plates, counterparties and regulatory trust. The exit of the auditing body without adverse findings would leave the company unprovoked. “Operation Cooke Point 2.0” is a term used by the encryption industry to refer to regulatory pressures during the Biden government, meaning that, following the FTX collapse, United States regulators informally pressured banks to restrict service encryption. Sethi states that the United States FDIC sent at least 25 letters to 24 banks requesting them to suspend or avoid expanding encryption-related operations. The ruling was also seen as a legal response by the encryption industry to the associated regulatory pressures。