San Francisco-based Bitcoin exchange Kraken today released statistics showing that it’s increasingly burdened by disclosure requests, particularly from U.S. law enforcement and regulators.

For 2018, Kraken, formally known as Payward Inc., said it had received 475 law enforcement inquiries from global government agencies, with 315 coming from the U.S., nearly triple the number received in 2017.

Although that’s seemingly not a huge number, Kraken argued that each request requires different details, meaning it’s not simply a case of pulling data on hand but a time-consuming process of crafting a response to meet the request.

“You can see why many businesses choose to block U.S. users,” Kraken wrote on Twitter. “Cost of handling subpoenas (regardless of licenses) is quickly becoming a barrier to entry.”

Peek at our Compliance team's 2018 Transparency Report. You can see why many businesses choose to block US users. Cost of handling subpoenas (regardless of licenses) is quickly becoming a barrier to entry. Inquiries up 3x YoY. pic.twitter.com/YbyLEqhOUf

— Kraken Exchange (@krakenfx) January 5, 2019

Complicating matters further is that at least some subpoenas turn out to be nothing more than fishing attempts, according to the exchance.

“U.S. is about 1/5 of clients but 2/3 of requests. U.S. agencies are much more active and are much less surgical,” Kraken said in a another tweet. “For many requests, we have no matches. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that the same subpoenas go out to everyone in the hopes that a match will be found.”

Part of the problem, it added, is that the requests often require a lot of amount of education and back-and-forth communications. “We’ll get requests for ‘all transactions,’ which could be petabytes of data when they actually only need the withdrawals from last week for one guy,” the company said.

Of the 315 requests from U.S.-based law enforcement and regulators, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security made the most requests at 91, followed by the Federal Bureau of Investigations at 67 and the Drug Enforcement Administration with 40. By comparison, the Securities and Exchanges Commission made only 19 requests in 2018.

Depending on which report is to be believed, Kraken is either looking to go public this year or raise more money via a private offering to high-net-worth investors. Either way, its current valuation is pegged at about $4 billion.

The company is also facing legal action. It was named in a lawsuit filed by UnitedCorp in December in relation to its role in supporting the Bitcoin Cash ABC group.

Image: bellatrix6/Flickr