Financial goliaths are hustling to build their own market structure to trade crypto assets. Their aim? To create an infrastructure able to sidestep the pitfalls seen from their crypto-native peers.
As crypto-native firms collapse in bankruptcy and scandal, big asset managers and hedge funds are waiting to pounce on the potentially massive amounts of capital and liquidity in crypto markets.
“But until they see a proper market structure, they won’t enter this market in any significant way,” Sameer Shalaby, CEO at VersiFi, told DL News. VersiFi is building a digital asset trading platform aimed at institutional investors that mimics the role of a prime broker — facilitating trades and helping to spread out risk.
FTX’s own legal team this week said it handled the messy winding up of the disgraced exchange, telling a Delaware bankruptcy court that the firm had recovered $7.3 billion of client assets from the “dumpster fire.”
As FTX unravelled late last year, finance giants hatched plans to dive into the space. The moves come as FTX’s crypto-native peers Binance and Coinbase face legal action for allegedly violating securities laws.
Without much fanfare, heavyweight market makers and speed trading firms Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial and asset managers including Charles Schwab, with funding from VC funds like Sequoia Capital, last year launched digital asset exchange EDX Markets.
EDX said at the time that it “aimed to remove significant conflicts of interest that affect existing cryptocurrency exchanges by separating responsibility for operating the exchange from the entities trading on it.”
