TP ICAP adds crypto spot trading for institutional investors
Last week, TP ICAP, which is the largest interdealer-broker in the world, announced that its Fusion Digital Assets marketplace for spot crypto trading had launched with its first trade. This move is aimed at introducing crypto to more institutional investors during a prolonged bear market and after a number of headline-grabbing scandals rocked the industry.
Simon Forster, who is the global co-head of Digital Assets at TP ICAP Group, told CoinDesk that “While the crypto-native landscape still feels a little somber, when we look at our traditional client base and we look at the relationships we’ve been developing, it actually feels reasonably optimistic. There’s a lot of people building interesting things. And it feels like 2022 is this watershed moment where the crypto landscape has changed we think probably forever.”
Companies that are tailored to traditional finance need to have strict governance and regulatory structures in place before offering any service to investors, which makes the launch of a new marketplace a long and difficult process. TP ICAP aims to offer infrastructure that looks more familiar to institutional investors than what’s offered by vertically-integrated crypto exchanges that combine their exchange, custody and other businesses and create potential conflicts of interest, explained Forster.
The Fusion Digital Assets marketplace has a partitioned operational structure that includes TP ICAP’s Fusion electronic trading platform that provides the non-custodial crypto exchange, Fidelity’s Digital Assets SM as the custodian that holds and settles client assets, and an aggregation of liquidity sources including Flow Traders and XBTO Global. TP ICAP plans to bring on additional custodians in the future to provide more options for investors.
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The first trade on the platform was a bitcoin-U.S. dollar (XBTUSD) pairs trade. Currently, the marketplace supports trading in bitcoin and ether (ETH) against USD, but the firm is open to expanding the assets it supports according to client demand.
TP ICAP’s Digital Assets arm has been in existence since 2019. Three years later, TP ICAP announced it would offer clients the ability to trade crypto-linked exchange-traded products (ETPs). The company gained its UK crypto license in December after registering with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), meaning the new Fusion Digital Marketplace is open to traders in the region. The firm plans to add additional supported regions as regulatory approvals permit, said Forster.
This article has been edited by Stephen Alpher.
