TP ICAP, the world's largest trading brokerage platform, announced last week that the Fusion Digital Assets marketplace for spot Crypto trading went live with its first transaction. The traditional finance giant is bringing crypto assets to more corporate investors amid a prolonged market slump and after several scandals rocked the industry.
“Even though the crypto market landscape is still a bit bleak, when we look at our traditional customer base and look at the relationships we're developing, we actually feel quite lost. “There are a lot of people building interesting things,” Simon Forster, global co-head of Digital Assets at TP ICAP Group, told CoinDesk. And it looks like 2022 is the turning point where the crypto market landscape has changed we think maybe forever.”
Companies specializing in traditional finance need to have a strict regulatory and management structure before providing any services to investors, which makes launching new markets a lengthy process. long and difficult. Forster explained TP ICAP wants to provide infrastructure that looks more familiar to corporate investors than what is offered by crypto exchanges that integrate trading, custody and corporate features. their differences, and this could create a potential conflict of interest.
Fusion Digital Assets has a partitioned operating structure consisting of TP ICAP's Fusion electronic trading platform providing non-custodial crypto trading services, SM Fidelity Digital Assets Platform operating as the custodian hold and settle client assets and aggregate liquidity sources including Flow Traders and XBTO Global. TP ICAP plans to add more custodians in the future to provide more options for investors.
The first transaction is the bitcoin-USD (XBTUSD) trading pair. The market currently supports trading in bitcoin and ether (ETH) against USD, but the company is open to expanding the assets it supports according to customer 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 exchange-traded products (ETPs) linked to the crypto products. The company received its UK crypto license in December after registering with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), meaning the new Fusion Digital Market is open to traders in the region. Forster said the company plans to add additional supported regions upon regulatory approval.
