Kraken says Cardano withdrawals remain delayed by roughly 12 hours after maintenance on its ADA funding gateway stretched well beyond the original 24-hour window, although deposits have now returned to normal processing.
The crypto exchange said at 8:30 a.m. UTC on Aug. 29 that Cardano deposits were processing normally again, but customers attempting to withdraw ADA could continue experiencing delays of approximately 12 hours while it completed the remaining maintenance work. Kraken’s wider platform was operating normally, with its status page classifying only digital-currency funding as degraded.
The latest update came more than three days after Kraken began the planned work.
Maintenance started at 8:00 a.m. UTC on Aug. 26 and was initially expected to last approximately 24 hours, until Aug. 27. Kraken warned customers that Cardano deposits and withdrawals would be unavailable during that period and said transfers submitted during the maintenance window would be processed after the work was completed.
By 2:29 p.m. UTC on Aug. 26, Kraken said maintenance remained underway. The original completion time then passed without service being restored.
At 11:33 p.m. UTC on Aug. 27, the exchange said the scheduled work would be extended by approximately another 24 hours. Maintenance was still ongoing at 7:46 a.m. UTC on Aug. 29, before Kraken reported 44 minutes later that deposits had finally returned to normal.
That means the maintenance had been running for about 72.5 hours when deposit processing resumed — roughly three times the length of the original estimate.
Kraken has not publicly explained what required the extended maintenance or identified a specific problem with its Cardano infrastructure. Its updates have continued to characterize the event as scheduled gateway maintenance rather than an unexpected Cardano network outage.
The remaining impact is now concentrated on withdrawals. Customers can deposit ADA normally, but someone moving Cardano from Kraken to an external wallet or another exchange could face an additional wait of around 12 hours.
Kraken’s support documentation explains that cryptocurrency funding involves several stages beyond simply receiving a blockchain transaction. Deposits must reach the required level of network confirmation before becoming fully available, while Kraken’s systems separately track whether a deposit has been received, credited and ultimately completed.
The exchange similarly allows customers to track crypto withdrawals through their funding activity, including the blockchain transaction identifier once a transaction has been sent to the network.
Cardano exchange integrations themselves can involve several pieces of infrastructure. Cardano’s developer documentation describes components including cardano-node, which connects directly to the blockchain; cardano-db-sync, which indexes blockchain information; and wallet infrastructure used to construct, sign and submit transactions. Exchanges can build their own architecture around these components rather than relying on a single Cardano service.
That makes an exchange funding-gateway interruption different from a blockchain-wide failure. Kraken has not said the current maintenance reflects a problem with Cardano’s consensus or transaction-processing network.
Other Kraken Funding Issues Remain Open
The extended Cardano work is occurring while Kraken is dealing with several separate funding incidents involving other digital assets.
The exchange has been investigating THORChain funding delays since Aug. 26. Deposits and withdrawals involving RUNE and RUJI may be delayed, with Kraken saying on Aug. 28 that it was continuing to work on a fix.
Kraken is also investigating delayed deposits for Nesa’s NES token, an incident first reported on Aug. 24.
Separately, Memecore deposits remain disabled as a precaution after an Aug. 19 funding-gateway incident. Withdrawals have since been restored.
Stablr USD and Stablr Euro funding methods have been halted for considerably longer following an issue affecting their underlying smart contract. Kraken said in May that there was no indication its own wallets or systems had been compromised.
The exchange also experienced an Ethereum withdrawal delay on Aug. 28, although that incident was resolved within several hours.
There is no evidence that these incidents share a common technical cause with the Cardano maintenance. Kraken’s status reporting treats them as separate asset- or network-specific events.
Analysis: Three Days of Maintenance Changes the Nature of the Disruption
A planned 24-hour maintenance window is relatively easy for an exchange customer to accommodate. A process that stretches past 72 hours and still leaves withdrawals delayed is more consequential.
That does not necessarily mean anything has gone seriously wrong.
Crypto exchange infrastructure sometimes requires lengthy synchronization, migration or verification work. Restoring a gateway is also not simply a matter of switching withdrawals back on the moment technical changes are finished. An exchange may need to reconcile pending transactions, verify wallet balances, test transaction creation and ensure that deposits made during the outage are processed correctly.
Kraken has not said which of those issues, if any, explains the extension.
But the timeline matters because crypto withdrawals are one of the few exchange functions for which customers are often particularly sensitive to availability.
A trader holding ADA solely to buy and sell on Kraken may barely notice the maintenance if trading remains operational. Someone using the exchange as a bridge between fiat markets and the Cardano ecosystem has a different experience. If the purpose of buying ADA is to move it to a self-custody wallet, stake it elsewhere, interact with a Cardano application or transfer it to another venue, a three-day funding interruption materially limits what the customer can do.
The latest update is nevertheless a significant improvement.
Deposits returning to normal suggests Kraken has restored at least one direction of the funding gateway. The roughly 12-hour withdrawal delay sounds more like a backlog or controlled return to normal operation than the complete suspension customers faced during most of the maintenance period.
That phased restoration also makes operational sense.
Incoming transactions can be observed onchain and credited after confirmation. Outgoing withdrawals require the exchange to construct, authorize and broadcast transactions from wallets under its control. Exchanges can therefore choose to restore deposits before fully reopening outgoing flows while they validate their infrastructure.
The episode also illustrates why “the blockchain is working” does not necessarily mean exchange users can move their coins.
Centralized exchanges add another infrastructure layer on top of decentralized networks. They maintain nodes, wallet systems, signing infrastructure, blockchain indexers and internal ledgers. Any one of those components can require maintenance while Cardano itself continues processing transactions.
That distinction becomes particularly important when users hold assets primarily for external use rather than trading.
The more notable issue for Kraken is the gap between the initial estimate and the actual maintenance period. A 24-hour window became more than three days before deposits were normalized. Even technically justified maintenance creates uncertainty when users receive little information beyond repeated notices that the work remains in progress.
For now, the problem appears to be moving toward resolution rather than worsening. Deposits are back, the rest of Kraken is operating normally, and the remaining withdrawal delay has been quantified at roughly 12 hours.
The next important update will be whether Kraken clears that backlog and marks the Cardano gateway fully operational — and whether it provides any explanation for why a one-day maintenance window ultimately required several days to complete.