How Kraken rebuilt its infrastructure to survive 10x the load

In July 2025, as bitcoin first broke $120,000, Kraken saw the largest volume spike it had ever handled — and at the worst moment of that spike, about 11% of all requests to the platform failed. By the exchange's own account, that was unacceptable: roughly 135,500 clients hit errors, about 40,000 of them while trying to fund their accounts.

A year later, Kraken's engineering blog laid out how it rebuilt its infrastructure in response. The error rate now sits at 0.111%, while the platform carries more than ten times the load it did back then. The standard the exchange set for itself: the platform has to survive at least twice the heaviest load it has ever handled in production, on demand, every time it's tested. Internally, those tests are called "war games" — engineered floods of trading activity aimed at production systems, run as scheduled fire drills rather than reactive responses to an already-unfolding crisis.

“The quality and stability of our platform is the product.”

— Kraken, Kraken Engineering Blog

• Five consecutive full-scale load tests, zero incidents
• Production now sustains more than 230,000 successful requests per second
• On February 5, 2026, during one of the sharpest selloffs of the past year, every major service held with no incidents

Beyond the July outage, Kraken also had an October episode: during its Kraken Launch token offering, 60-80% of sessions dropped for about 2.5 hours. It was after that string of incidents that the company made "war games" a standing practice rather than a one-off fix. The same underlying logic — build in headroom before a crisis rather than patch things after one — is what's driving Firedancer, the new Solana validator client, designed to keep that network running through peak load instead of stalling out.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.