Kraken to facilitate NFTs as collateral for loans

Kraken CEO, Jesse Powell has done it again. Powell recently revealed to Bloomberg that the crypto exchange platform is now also working towards launching a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace that can allow consumers to make functional uses of their tokenised collection, including utilising NFTs as collateral to borrow funds against. Powell noted that the upcoming NFT marketplace aims to support custody services, along with adding the exclusive feature of collateralizing NFTs for loans.

Kraken exchange CEO, Jesse Powell told Bloomberg in an interview that, “If you deposit a CryptoPunk on Kraken, we want to be able to reflect the value of that in your account. And if you want to borrow funds against that” the company’s exclusive NFT marketplace will enable that service as well.

He explained NFTs’ evolution overtime, starting off with speculations, moving on to trade and exchange as a medium of an additional revenue stream, and now at last – extracting functional uses of NFTs to finally bring them to mainstream economy.

However, Powell also highlighted the fact that NFTs are in fact as old as the OG Bitcoin, when back in the day developers suggested “tagging” parts of the Bitcoin blockchain with metadata. Nevertheless, he noted that similar to Bitcoin, NFTs also took their sweet time to finally expand and become common knowledge.

“I guess it took the right combination of events, something really popular like NBA Top Shots that really got people talking about it…Phase one was speculation, phase two is buying art and supporting artists, phase three is going to be functional uses of NFTs”, he added.

Kraken CEO on Shiba Inu listing

Powell holds bold opinions about the industry and he communicated some of them in the interview. While discussing prospects for NFTs, Powell also emphasised the forcible listing of the trending meme token, Shiba Inu ($SHIB). He claimed that back in November, Kraken decided to list SHIB in lieu of sheer customer interest.

“There’s not incredibly interesting new technology there or anything, it’s just largely community-driven interest. It’s basically a meme-coin that has the community’s attention and sometimes you have to just list those.”