Kraken is investigating delays affecting withdrawals through its Ethereum ERC20 funding gateway, widening a cluster of cryptocurrency funding problems that has already touched multiple unrelated blockchain networks during September.
The exchange opened the latest incident at 07:48 UTC on September 18, warning that withdrawals through the Ethereum ERC20 gateway could be delayed. Five minutes later, Kraken said it was continuing to investigate the problem.
Other funding methods remained operational, according to the exchange, and there was no indication of a broader trading or platform outage.
The distinction is important because an ERC20 gateway problem has the potential to affect a much wider group of assets than the individual blockchain disruptions Kraken has reported recently. ERC20 is the token standard used by a large number of assets issued on Ethereum, meaning one gateway issue can potentially create withdrawal delays across many tokens rather than a single cryptocurrency.
Kraken’s status page was showing degraded funding performance for numerous Ethereum-based assets on Friday, while its website, Kraken App, Kraken Pro, derivatives services, APIs, equities and other major platform components remained operational.
The incident arrives only a day after Dave Finances documented a series of cryptocurrency funding disruptions involving Cardano, Polkadot, Sui, MultiversX, Base, Solana, Avalanche and other networks.
Several of those earlier incidents were relatively short. Others persisted for considerably longer.
Kraken’s Polkadot funding problem, for example, remained open for almost three days before being resolved on September 14. A Sui incident lasted more than two days, while a separate MultiversX funding problem opened on September 16 and was still listed as degraded when the ERC20 incident appeared.
VeChain has now joined that group. Kraken began investigating delays affecting VET deposits and withdrawals at 11:33 UTC on September 17 and continued to list the gateway as degraded into September 18.
The exchange is also still carrying a much broader funding incident first opened on September 4.
That event initially affected more than 20 networks, including Cosmos Hub, Akash, Celestia, dYdX, Dymension, Fetch.ai, Injective, Juno, Kava, Neutron, Osmosis, Saga, Secret Network, Stride, Terra, Terra Classic and THORChain. Kraken has restored services to some affected networks but continued posting updates saying work was underway on the remaining chains.
The concentration of Cosmos-linked networks in that incident suggests at least part of the September disruption has involved infrastructure shared by related blockchain ecosystems. That does not, however, establish any connection between the Cosmos problems and the new Ethereum ERC20 issue.
Kraken has not disclosed a common technical cause linking the incidents.
There is also currently no evidence that the disruptions involve compromised customer assets, stolen private keys or a security breach. That separates the current situation from incidents such as the recent Liquid Network disruption, where a network-level vulnerability resulted in approximately 4,000 BTC leaving reserves backing L-BTC.
Kraken’s own institutional custody status provides another useful distinction. Its Ethereum and ERC20 custody components were listed as operational even while customer-facing digital-currency funding showed degraded performance. That makes it premature to characterize the incident as a failure of Kraken’s entire Ethereum custody infrastructure.
The latest technical problems should also not be confused with the separate account restrictions reported by some Kraken customers. Those cases involve account-level security, verification or compliance reviews rather than blockchain funding gateways.
Kraken has separately introduced additional biometric checks around some crypto transfers, while another customer recently said a USDC transfer from Bitget preceded a 13-day account restriction. There is no evidence connecting either issue to Friday’s ERC20 withdrawal delays.
The ERC20 Incident Makes the Shared-Infrastructure Question Harder to Ignore
One broken blockchain gateway is normal operational noise for a large crypto exchange.
Even several incidents are not necessarily evidence of something systemic. Kraken supports a large number of networks, each with different node software, transaction rules, wallet architectures and upgrade schedules. Something is almost always being maintained somewhere.
But the September pattern is becoming harder to dismiss as a collection of completely uninteresting one-off events.
The ERC20 incident matters because Ethereum tokens represent a different scale of exposure. A problem with VeChain affects VeChain. A problem with MultiversX affects EGLD. An ERC20 gateway can sit underneath funding for a large collection of assets using the same blockchain infrastructure.
That makes the architecture behind the gateway more important than the number of individual token tickers showing degraded performance.
The obvious question is whether any shared component is appearing repeatedly across Kraken’s recent incidents.
Possible candidates could include node-management infrastructure, transaction queues, wallet software, signing systems, RPC providers, custody orchestration or other services sitting between Kraken’s internal ledger and individual blockchains.
There is currently no public evidence identifying any of those as the cause.
That qualification matters. Similar-looking outages do not automatically share the same failure point. A Cosmos node problem, an Ethereum withdrawal queue and a VeChain wallet issue could be completely unrelated even if all three appear on the same status page during the same week.
Still, shared infrastructure is increasingly important as exchanges abstract hundreds of blockchain connections behind one customer interface. A recent Coinbase incident affecting DEX, Borrow and Lend simultaneously illustrated the same investigative principle: products that look independent to customers can depend on common wallet, authentication or transaction infrastructure underneath.
That is why Kraken’s next technical disclosure matters more than another “resolved” notice.
If the ERC20 gateway returns to normal and the remaining network incidents disappear independently, the September cluster may ultimately prove to be an unusually busy period of unrelated maintenance and blockchain-specific faults.
If new incidents continue appearing across unrelated networks, or previously affected gateways repeatedly fail again, the probability of a common operational dependency becomes more interesting.
For customers, the practical risk is simple. Trading can continue while the ability to move an asset does not.
During quiet markets that may be an inconvenience. During sharp volatility, delayed withdrawals can prevent traders from moving collateral, shifting assets to another exchange or transferring funds into self-custody when they want to reduce counterparty exposure.
Kraken has so far contained the problems to funding gateways rather than an exchange-wide outage. But with ERC20 withdrawals now joining MultiversX, VeChain and the long-running Cosmos-heavy funding incident, the status page is starting to provide a useful test of whether September’s repeated disruptions remain isolated blockchain problems or reveal something deeper inside the infrastructure connecting Kraken to them.
Shane Neagle is a financial markets analyst and digital assets journalist specializing in cryptocurrencies, memecoins, prediction markets, and blockchain-based financial systems. His work focuses on market structure, incentive design, liquidity dynamics, and how speculative behavior emerges across decentralized platforms.
He closely covers emerging crypto narratives, including memecoin ecosystems, on-chain activity, and the role of prediction markets in pricing political, economic, and technological outcomes. His analysis examines how capital flows, trader psychology, and platform design interact to create rapid market cycles across Web3 environments.
Alongside digital assets, Shane follows broader fintech and online trading developments, particularly where traditional financial infrastructure intersects with blockchain technology. His research-driven approach emphasizes understanding why markets behave the way they do, rather than short-term price movements, helping readers navigate fast-evolving crypto and speculative markets with clearer context.