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Margin allowance limits

The availability of margin trading services is subject to certain limitations and eligibility criteria. Kraken maintains margin pools in 24 cryptocurrencies and four cash currencies, which allow you to trade using margin.

What Are The Margin Allowance Limits?
The margin allowance limits for each currency are shown below, these values represent the maximum amount of the asset you are permitted to obtain from the Kraken margin pool.  
AssetAllowance
AUD*150,000
CAD*500,000
CHF*300,000
EUR*8,000,000
GBP*1,000,000
JPY*2,500,000
USD*15,000,000
AAVE670
ADA1,200,000
ALGO320,000
APE15,000
APT5,680
ARB13,600
ATOM19,000
AVAX4,200
AXS2,300
BAT230,000
BCH710
BLUR48,000
BTC310
COMP720
CRV38,000
DAI470,000
DASH860
DOGE4,200,000
DOT43,000
EOS76,000
ETC3,600
ETH2,600
FIL14,000
FLOW35,000
FLR960,000
FTM62,000
GRT340,000
KAVA45,000
KEEP**0
KSM1,200
LDO24,160
LINK25,000
LRC70,000
LTC4,600
MANA130,000
MATIC360,000
MINA52,000
NANO9,000
OCEAN156,000
OMG32,000
PAXG110
REP500
SAND48,000
SC6,500,000
SOL18,000
TRX1,700,000
UNI8,100
USDC4,900,000
USDT5,600,000
WAVES7,900
XLM800,000
XMR1,400
XRP1,100,000
XTZ74,000
ZEC2,600

*CAD, CHF, EUR, GBP, JPY and USD margin allowance limits only apply to long positions. See below for further explanation. **All KEEP markets are in Reduce Only meaning you cannot open new Margin positions. You can only reduce the size of your existing ones. If you try to open a spot position on margin that exceeds your allowance limits, you will see a "Margin allowance exceeded" error. Additionally, if you try to open a margin position that exceeds the limit, you will see the error "Margin position size exceeded". 

How Do Margin Allowance Limits Work?
Margin allowance limits are separate for each currency. So you could use up to 19,000 ATOM and 1,000,000 GBP from our margin pools at the same time (assuming there are funds available in the pool).

Margin allowance limits are a total per currency, not a total per position. So you can create a single BTC/USD long position for 15,000,000 USD, or ten BTC/USD long positions at 1,500,000 USD each.

Margin allowance limits are reset when you close a position, which automatically repays the funds to our margin pool.

Note: Where the margin pool funds are derived from depends on the trading pair and whether you are long or short.

Long vs short
For a crypto-to-cash pair like BTC/USD:
  • To go long (i.e. buy BTC), funds from the USD pool are used and thus the USD allowance limits apply.
  • To go short (i.e. sell BTC), funds from the BTC pool are used and thus the BTC allowance limits apply.

For a crypto-to-crypto pair like ETH/BTC:

  • To go long (i.e. buy ETH), funds from the BTC pool are used and thus the BTC allowance limits apply.
  • To go short (i.e. sell ETH), funds from the ETH pool are used and thus the ETH allowance limits apply.

Note: The limits for going short are not supposed to be the same as the limits for going long. Limits are not based on the exchange rate. They are based on how much of each currency we have available in our margin pools.

Examples
Your account is verified and you want to open a long position in BTC/GBP. The maximum size of your long position, assuming you had enough collateral to open it, and you do not exceed the margin position limit, would be 310,000 GBP worth of bitcoin. The number of bitcoins that it would be possible to buy in these positions would depend on the current price of bitcoin. The limit would not be 310 bitcoin.

If you wanted to open a short position in bitcoin against USD, EUR or ETH, the limit on the size of the position would be 310 bitcoin because when you are shorting bitcoin, you are using Kraken’s funds from the BTC margin pool.

The decimal and thousands separators shown in this article may differ from the formats displayed on our trading platforms. Review our article on how we use points and commas for more information.