Department of Justice Drops Investigation Into Kraken Founder Jesse Powell: Report

The United States Department of Justice has allegedly dropped its investigation against Kraken founder Jesse Powell, a Tuesday report from Fortune claims.

According to the July 22 report, federal agents raided Powell’s home in 2023 stemming from a “management dispute” over the nonprofit Verge Center for the Arts, which he co-founded back in the late aughts.

The Department of Justice has since returned “dozens” seized from Powell’s home, including laptops and cellphones belonging to the crypto executive, over claims he stalked and hacked the arts nonprofit.

The Kraken founder has long pushed back on the allegations, filing a civil lawsuit against members of Verge’s board for the “baseless” and “devastating” accusations against him.

However, Fortune’s report verifies that the probe into Powell has formally concluded and supposedly proves that his “account of events is correct.”

Very glad to have this behind me. It never made sense but neither does the @rstormsf trial. Wild how quickly you can have your life upended. I'm grateful for those who saw through it and for my stellar legal team. Now, turning my attention back to @krakenfx. https://t.co/LbaDxN0bCl

“I knew I had done nothing wrong, and discovery in my defamation case against Verge has shown this is undeniable,” Powell told the media outlet.

Kraken was sued by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2023 for allegedly operating as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, dealer, and clearing agency.

“We allege that Kraken made a business decision to reap hundreds of millions of dollars from investors rather than coming into compliance with the securities laws,” Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said in a statement at the time.

“That decision resulted in a business model rife with conflicts of interest that placed investors’ funds at risk,” he added.

The case was eventually dropped earlier this year by Mark Uyeda, then Acting Chairman of the SEC, as part of the federal agency’s push away from its traditional regulation-by-enforcement toward the digital asset sector as a whole.

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