Analysis3 min read
Monero is in the news because Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said the exchange's Monero withdrawal questionnaires were wrong, withdrew them and confirmed that XMR stays listed. His statement on X carries a timestamp of 02:15 UTC on 24 October, which The Defiant dated to late on 23 October in US time. It matters because Kraken drew a public line between asking where a customer's money came from and asking what the customer does with it afterwards.
What Kraken asked, and what changed
Kraken had emailed clients who bought XMR with their own money and then withdrew it, asking for their employer, the source of the funds and what they planned to do with the coins. Sethi wrote that no rule required the requests, and traced them to one judgement call: someone saw a young client with a lot of money and called it a red flag, which he rejected. "That is not a red flag," he wrote, Blockchain Reporter reported.
He said the requests are withdrawn, that the affected clients have been told nothing is required of them, and that the question about what a customer does with their coins once they leave Kraken is gone and unacceptable. He also confirmed that Monero remains listed on the exchange. Blockchain Reporter, which quoted the statement, noted that it does not resolve how other venues should handle privacy-coin transactions or whether regulators will comment on post-withdrawal questions.
What Kraken still does
The withdrawal of the questionnaires is a change to one question, not an end to compliance. Sethi drew the line himself: where your money came from is a fair question, what you do with it after it leaves is not. Kraken keeps its longstanding source-of-funds checks for anti-money-laundering purposes, and its information-request policy, updated on 1 October, can pause trading and deposits for a customer who does not answer a routine review, though withdrawals are not affected, The Defiant reported.
Availability still has a geographic limit. Kraken ended XMR trading and deposits in the European Economic Area on 31 October 2024, having ended XMR trading for UK customers in 2021, Cointelegraph reported.
The episode did not move the price on its own: Blockchain Reporter put Monero near $602 on 24 October, up roughly 2% over 24 hours, and called the walkback a customer-service and compliance-policy event rather than a market event. Blockchain Reporter.
Where Monero's own development stands
The protocol side of the story is FCMP++, the upgrade that would replace ring signatures with full-chain membership proofs. As of 23 October it was not live and no official fork date had been announced, Coin Alert News reported, citing CryptoNews. It is being tested on a separate stressnet, which forked to FCMP++ and Carrot at block 3,102,800 on 5 October without affecting the main network, CryptoTicker reported. The latest mainnet release is 0.18.5.4, a bug-fix point release published on GitHub on 17 October, and the Monero downloads page lists that version, named Fluorine Fermi, as current. The only public timeline is a developer draft plan that calls itself a non-binding working draft, and it pencilled in a first fork-enabled release for 14 to 21 October 2026, a fully featured release in early December, and activation around the first week of March 2027, Coin Alert News reported.
What to watch
The draft plan's first fork-enabled release window, 14 to 21 October 2026, has passed: as of 27 October, the project's GitHub releases page still listed 0.18.5.4 as the latest release. The dates to watch are the same plan's early-December release and activation around the first week of March 2027, both explicitly non-binding. On the exchange side, the open question is whether other venues that have restricted or questioned Monero activity change their own approach to post-withdrawal questions, and whether any regulator weighs in on them.
