The veteran US-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken will enable trading and staking services for Polkadot (DOT) starting August 18th. The addition comes shortly after the sharded multichain network raised over $40 million in its second private token sale.
According to the statement from the US exchange, Polkadot is “coming to Kraken, but not without important changes before trading begins.” During Polkadot’s first stakeholder vote, opened to any DOT token holder, the community decided to redenominate the coins three days after transactions are enabled.
As a result, transactions on the Polkadot network will begin on August 18th, but all DOT tokens will be redenominated by a factor of 100 on August 21st. Essentially, the process of redenomination will change how DOT is defined in terms of its smallest unit of account (the Planck).
In other words, 1 DOT before August 21st held in a private wallet will automatically convert to 100 DOT after that date. However, the number of Plancks in the wallet will not change.
The redenomination doesn’t plan any fundamental protocol changes, and the precise time could fluctuate. In some cases, it may lead to a delay, and users’ DOT tokens could be altered after August 21st.
“Kraken will list Polkadot tokens denominated as New DOT on August 18th. Put simply, if you deposit 1 Old DOT on Kraken between August 18th and August 21st, your account will be credited for 100 New DOT. Clients who have already claimed Old DOT with Kraken will see their balances converted to New Dot prior to August 18th.” – the statement reads.
Initial trading pairs will include DOT/USD, DOT/EUR, DOT/XBT, and DOT/ETH. However, users will not be able to withdraw new DOT tokens from Kraken until the official redenomination is completed.
The popular exchange also asserted that it will allow staking for DOT with a 12% annual fixed reward, paid twice per week. Users can start staking immediately with “no waiting period.”
The current market price for the old DOT token is about $330. If it doesn’t change by the listing time at 16:40 UTC (shortly after block 1,205,128) and because of the redenomination, the “market price for New DOT on Kraken might be around $3.30.”
It will be interesting to see how the price will perform following the Kraken listing as the $330 price is almost three times higher than during the token sale. According to some reports at the time, one DOT token went for $125. The sale lasted for three days from July 24th to July 27th and raised nearly 4,000 bitcoins (worth about $43,3 million) via 1,059 transitions, per this address associated with Polkadot.
It’s worth noting that the blockchain project processing many transactions on several chains in parallel had its initial token sale in 2017 when it raised $145 million.
