Nelson Minier is in charge of OTC (over-the-counter) trading at Kraken, a major cryptocurrency platform. According to Minier, since the beginning of 2018, the trades at the OTC desk have increased steadily by a factor of 20.

Minier discussed this in an August 20th episode of The Scoop, The Block’s podcast. He went on to say that Ether and Bitcoin are doing very well. He estimates that Tether (USDT), Monero (XMR), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ether (ETH), and Bitcoin (BTC) were, by volume, among the top 5 traded cryptocurrencies.

Minier gave some predictions regarding the price of BTC, stating that he doesn’t foresee the demand for it decreasing but also realizes that it will eventually be cut in half in May 2019 (which was earlier this year). He believes that Bitcoin’s high price is one of the best marketing tools Kraken has.

Kraken’s Lawsuit over OTC’s Location

Back in April, Jonathan Silverman, a former Kraken employee, sued the company for around $900,000. He managed Kraken’s trading desk in New York City but wasn’t compensated according to an oral agreement that was made with Kraken’s founder, Jesse Powell. Silverman specifically acknowledged that the company had lied to him about not having operations in New York City.

According to the lawsuit, Kraken misrepresented to government regulators and to the public that it wasn’t operating in New York City when in actuality, all of Kraken’s operations including their OTC trading and practices as well as negotiations, wire transfers, and logins into the Kraken exchange did take place there.

In response, Christina Vee, a spokesperson for Kraken, claims that Silverman was in not only in breach of his confidentiality agreement, but was lying as well.

Problems with Kraken’s Website

It was recently reported that Kraken had experienced some difficulties with its application programming interface, or API, and its website. Kraken made an announcement via Twitter on August 13th that it was experiencing connection issues with its API and the website.