Marco Santori, Chief Legal Officer, Kraken

Episode 18 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block's Frank Chaparro and Kraken's Chief Legal Officer Marco Santori.

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This episode of The Scoop, produced by The Block, features Marco Santori, who at the time served as chief legal officer of Kraken, one of the longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States.

During this episode, Chaparro and Santori also discuss:

'Operation Choke Point 2.0'
Kraken's efforts to establish a bank
How regulators view DeFi

Santori, a lawyer widely credited as one of the architects of modern digital-asset regulatory strategy, had joined Kraken from the law firm Cooley after years advising crypto companies and industry groups on how to navigate an uncertain patchwork of state and federal rules.

The centerpiece of the conversation is Kraken's plan to launch its own bank, Kraken Financial, under Wyoming's newly created special purpose depository institution charter, a first-of-its-kind framework designed specifically for digital-asset firms. Santori explains why Kraken pursued a state-chartered banking license rather than working solely through traditional partner banks, and he details the operational hurdles still standing in the way, including the need to secure correspondent banking relationships and, eventually, direct access to the Federal Reserve's payment system. He also addresses the open question of whether other states would recognize Kraken's Wyoming charter, a point of genuine uncertainty for a bank built around a novel regulatory structure.

The discussion places Kraken's move in the context of a broader trend of crypto-native firms pushing into banking and wealth-management services, with rivals such as BlockFi and Abra cited as pursuing similar ambitions to offer yield, custody, and account-like products to crypto holders who had historically been underserved or turned away by traditional banks. Santori speaks candidly about the reluctance many mainstream financial institutions still showed toward crypto customers at the time, and why he saw purpose-built crypto banks as a natural response to that gap.

Throughout, he draws on his background as one of the industry's most prominent legal voices to explain how Kraken was trying to build compliant infrastructure from the ground up rather than retrofit crypto products onto legacy banking rails, offering listeners a detailed look at the regulatory engineering behind one of the exchange's most ambitious initiatives.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Circle, Railgun, Flare Network

About Circle
Circle is a global financial technology company helping money move at internet speed. Our mission is to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. Visit Circle.com to learn more.

About Railgun
Railgun is a private DeFi solution on Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum and Polygon. Shield any ERC-20 token and any NFT into a Private Balance and let Railgun’s zero-knowledge cryptography encrypt your address, balance and transaction history. You can also bring privacy to your project with Railgun SDK, and be sure to check out Railgun with partner project Railway Wallet, also available on iOS and Android. Visit Railgun.org to find out more.

About Flare
Flare is an EVM-based Layer 1 blockchain designed to allow developers to build applications that can use data from other blockchains and the internet. By providing decentralized access to a wide variety of high-integrity data from other blockchains and the internet, Flare enables new use cases and monetization models. Build better and connect everything at Flare.Network.