A former employee of the American stock exchange Kraken filed a lawsuit for $ 900,000. He claims that the stock exchange did not pay him for the work.
Jonathan Silverman, who, according to Bloomberg, joined the stock exchange in April 2017 to manage institutional sales and a branch in New York, claims to have reached a verbal agreement with Jesse Powell, the founder of the exchange, on receiving annual salary in the amount of $ 150,000, as well as a premium of 10% of the annual profit of the trading department.
In his lawsuit filed in New York on April 4, Silverman claims that the trading department made a profit of more than $ 19 million during the three months of 2017, but he did not receive any premium or promised additional share options. Kraken representative Christina Vee said that Silverman "is lying and violating his confidentiality agreement."
Silverman’s claims almost coincide with similar claims made in a separate lawsuit by former Kraken employee Robert Adler. He claims that from September 15, 2017 until the end of the same year, the trading department made a profit of $ 19 million. According to Silverman, after leaving the firm, he reached an agreement with Kraken, according to which he would be paid $ 907,631 at a time. The platform, however, refused to make a payment, it is alleged in its lawsuit. Silverman blames Kraken for the following:
“The public and government agencies have a wrong idea that the exchange does not work in New York. In fact, Kraken's OTC practice and over-the-counter trading (including entering the Kraken exchange and negotiating electronic transfers) took place almost exclusively in New York. ”
Bloomberg reports that Silverman was one of two employees who allegedly worked in the Kraken sales office in New York. Bloomberg further refers to a report by the Attorney General of New York for 2018 on cryptocurrency exchanges, in which Kraken was one of the platforms supposedly managing the internal trading divisions that buy and sell in their own market - along with Bitfinex, bitFlyer and Poloniex.
As previously reported, Kraken ceased to offer services to residents of New York in 2015 due to the implementation of the rules of BitLicense. In the fall of 2018, disagreements arose over the alleged operations of Kraken in New York, and before that the exchange, headquartered in California, decided to ignore the request from the Attorney General of New York.