New Crypto ECN Hits the Market
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: March 22, 2023
Crossover Markets, an initiative established by former Jefferies FX prime brokerage staffers Brandon Mulvihill and Anthony Mazzarese, has unveiled CrossX, an execution-only ECN for digital assets.
The firm’s seed investment round was funded by a consortium including Exness, Flow Traders, Gate.io, GMO Internet Group, Nomura’s Laser Digital, Pepperstone, Think Markets, TMGM, Two Sigma and Wintermute Ventures.
The firm says CrossX brings to market “one of the fastest crypto trading engines in the world”, adding it is designed to “dramatically” decrease trading costs, improve execution quality and enhance market data capabilities.
Crossover says it aims to avoid conflicts of interest by decoupling trade execution from custody and brokerage, giving institutions the ability to freely choose their own credit counterparties. As an execution-only trading venue provider, Crossover does not hold client funds, directly handle assets or carry counterparty risk, it states.
Crossover says its ECN leverages best practices and order logic from the equities and FX markets, seeking to deliver efficiencies. It claims sub-20 microsecond matching engine latency and throughput of millions of messages per second, which it says makes CrossX “positioned to be many times faster than typical crypto exchanges, providing clients access to the fastest pricing and trade executions”.
The platform also provides a substantial level of liquidity customisation, enabling clients to create custom dark and lit liquidity pools so they can trade with whom they want based on desired trade size, spread, toxicity and skew protection. It also supports anonymous, disclosed and semi-disclosed trading over one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many connections.
“As the digital assets space evolves, diverse and reliable execution venues for institutional trading are critical,” says Jeff Wecker, CTO at Two Sigma, while Michael Lie, head of digital asset trading at Flow Traders, adds, “We strongly believe CrossX can address the demand for an institutional-grade infrastructure, something Flow Traders strongly supports.”
Elsewhere, Olivier Dang, head of ventures at Laser Digital, says, “The Crossover platform will drive greater efficiency for market participants by providing ultra-low latency execution. The team brings unique Tradfi expertise to the digital asset ecosystem and we are looking forward to working closely with them on scaling up CrossX.”
Ken Nakamura, CEO at GMO Trust, adds, “CrossX provides a highly efficient and dependable execution platform for sophisticated institutional market participants, spanning both traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems.”
