From Kraken's direct connection to the Federal Reserve to the three major CEX "traditional finance" initiatives If we go back to when Bitcoin was first born, the ultimate vision of crypto fundamentalists was to "overturn" traditional Wall Street. However, looking at the entire industry from today's point in time, we find that the script is heading towards another extremely grand and pragmatic end: the crypto giants are not eliminating traditional finance, but are comprehensively devouring, integrating, and reshaping it into the next generation of global financial infrastructure. Recently, a series of intensive actions around the four top CEXs of Kraken, Binance, OKX, and Coinbase have formed the perfect puzzle for this grand narrative. Cryptocurrency exchanges are no longer just "lawless places for cryptocurrency trading". They are irreversibly growing into a "financial Leviathan" that integrates clearing and settlement centers, all asset securities firms, AI intelligent terminals, and compliant banks. 1、 Breakthrough in Bottom Pipeline: Kraken Directly Connected to the Federal Reserve, Sitting at the 'Main Table' of Clearing and Settlement For a long time, the biggest lifeline of the cryptocurrency industry has been the "fiat currency channel". No matter how large the exchange is, it must rely on traditional intermediary banks for clearing and settling fiat currencies, which leads to extremely high friction costs and systemic risks of being disconnected at any time. But Kraken broke this dimensional wall. Kraken Financial, a banking division under its Wyoming Special License (SPDI), has officially obtained approval from the Federal Reserve for its "main account," becoming the first cryptocurrency company to access the Federal Reserve's core payment system. What does this mean? This means that Kraken has crossed all intermediary commercial banks and directly connected to the Fedwire federal wire transfer network, which processes over $4 trillion per day. Although this is a 'limited authority' (excluding full fallback such as reserve interest calculation), Kraken is already on par with thousands of traditional American banks in terms of underlying clearing logic. The strong anxiety and criticism shown by traditional banking groups (BPI) in this regard precisely proves the fatal nature of this breakthrough. In conjunction with its $20 billion valuation and IPO plan, Kraken is telling an extremely sexy new story to the capital market: a crypto native bank that masters the underlying clearing and distribution capabilities of US fiat currency. 2、 Comprehensive integration of asset side: deep binding of tokenized securities and Wall Street capital When the underlying pipeline is opened up, the comprehensive integration of the asset side will come naturally. The top CEX is crazily introducing traditional financial (TradFi) assets into the crypto world, while also feeding back crypto liquidity to Wall Street. Binance's data reveals astonishing trends: From December 2025 to March 2026, the cumulative trading volume (purple area) and cumulative number of trades (pink line) of Binance TradFi perpetual contracts experienced a nearly vertical parabolic growth. In late January to early February 2026, the data reached a super turning point. Within just one month, the cumulative trading volume surpassed the $130 billion mark, with a total of nearly 90 million transactions. Among them, macro assets such as gold and silver dominated this frenzy. What does this steep growth curve mean? It means that massive amounts of cryptocurrency native funds are no longer satisfied with just speculating on pure on chain assets, but are beginning to flood into the pricing game of traditional macro assets through CEX's massive and slippery liquidity pool. At the same time, Binance Alpha pursued its victory and launched a large number of Ondo tokenized securities (the number has reached 20, covering core US stocks such as COIN, BABA, MSTR, etc.). This is not just about increasing trading varieties, it is using the liquidity of blockchain to reconstruct the underlying ownership and circulation methods of the US stock market. OKX dropped a shockwave: Intercontinental Exchange Group (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), has made a strategic investment in OKX at a valuation of $25 billion and joined the board of directors. This is not just an ordinary VC investment, but a century long alliance between the world's top traditional exchanges and top cryptocurrency exchanges. OKX plans to relocate 2000 employees to the United States, provide real-time encrypted pricing data to ICE, and enable over 120 million users worldwide to directly trade tokenized stocks and derivatives listed on the New York Stock Exchange by the second half of 2026. Traditional financial giant ICE clearly sees that the future liquidity lies in Crypto, and OKX is that bridge. Coinbase has directly entered the hinterland of traditional securities firms: Coinbase announced the direct launch of stock trading function (supporting extended trading 24 hours a day, 5 days a week). At the same time, its institutional oriented Coinbase Prime has launched a unified cross variety margin function, which calculates risk for spot, encrypted derivatives, and even regulated futures in a single account. This is already the world's top institutional Prime Broker gameplay. 3、 User Experience Upgrade: AI Driven and Authentic Social Networks While making great strides on the institutional end, CEX has also completed a downgrade blow to traditional brokerage apps in terms of user experience on the retail end (retail investors). Binance is fully "AI enabled": The 7 AI Agent Skills officially launched can be regarded as professional researchers for retail investors. From trading instructions that cover market trends, to "token details" that instantly return on chain liquidity and position distribution, to "contract audits" that automatically detect issuance/freezing risks, and "Meme Rush" that sorts out hot topic rotations. Combining with the MPC wallet under audit, Binance is encapsulating complex on chain interactions and investment research into extremely foolproof AI dialogue boxes. OKX has reshaped the trust foundation of "Social Trading": The Orbit social feature launched by the exchange directly generates the position, profit and loss, and transaction records displayed by users from the underlying data of the exchange, which cannot be edited or deleted. In conjunction with the creator incentive mechanism tied to KYC, OKX is building a decentralized financial Bloomberg+Snowball based on absolute real data. 4、 Embracing regulatory pains: a necessary path towards the sunshine With great power there must come great responsibility. The cost of completely devouring traditional finance is to face extremely strict national level compliance and tax supervision. This is also a sign of the maturity of the entire industry. Binance Asia Pacific plans to add 5 new licenses this year, bringing the global number of licenses to over 20. This heavy investment in compliance and legality is evident. In the United States, Coinbase is at the forefront of the regulatory game and adaptation. Coinbase has pointed out the irrationality of the 1099-DA digital asset tax declaration form for the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), such as the requirement to declare small stablecoin and gas fees that could cause system crashes, but is also actively sending tax forms to millions of users. The IRS has even proposed new regulations allowing exchanges to suspend services to customers who refuse to receive electronic tax receipts, and CoinLedger's data shows that a large number of US users have received tax warnings. At the same time, Coinbase executives strongly defended the value of stablecoins in the UK House of Lords, stating that fully reserved regulated stablecoins are "safer than uninsured bank deposits" and facing traditional politicians' concerns about "bank disintermediation (capital loss)". This is not only to defend oneself, but also to represent the entire cryptocurrency industry in striving for a voice on the mainstream political stage. Conclusion: The Intersection of the Old and New Worlds Looking at the latest developments of these four giants: Kraken has successfully cleared the underlying fiat currency; OKX and Binance have connected core traditional assets such as Chinese and American stocks through ICE and tokenized securities; Binance has restructured its trading terminals using AI; Coinbase has implemented strict European and American regulations, streamlining taxation and compliance. This is no longer a story of the 'cryptocurrency circle'. When cryptocurrency exchanges begin to provide one-stop trading of deposits, US stocks, gold, and cryptocurrencies to hundreds of millions of users worldwide with extremely low costs, 7x24 hour efficiency, real on chain data, and AI assistance, and accept tax audits from the IRS and bottom-up clearing from the Federal Reserve - the traditional Wall Street securities firms and banks' moats are being dismantled and reconstructed at an incredible speed. The encrypted world no longer needs to rely on traditional finance, as it is becoming a new form of traditional finance. Source：cryptoquant