Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/a4c19360-1bcf-4599-9ffe-b6a4d69f29fe
State Street, one of the world’s biggest asset managers, is tiptoeing into the crypto market by forging a deal to lend its trading technology to a digital currency trading venue.
The US-based financial group said on Thursday it would partner with Pure Digital, a start-up that aims to be the main institutional platform for bitcoin.
The new trading venue will offer cash cryptocurrency trading for investors through their existing bank relationships, with State Street’s Currenex platform providing the underlying technology. The venue is set to go live in “mid-2021”, the asset manager said.
David Newns, global head of execution services for GlobalLink at State Street Global Markets, said that the technology of currency trading platform Currenex would “translate perfectly to the digital arena”.
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/a4c19360-1bcf-4599-9ffe-b6a4d69f29fe
The Pure Digital platform was founded by Campbell Adams, a currency markets veteran who created a foreign exchange venue with the backing of a consortium of a dozen banks in 2014. “Banks are telling us that they can’t ignore client demand for crypto assets and they realise it’s a market they need to get into,” said Lauren Kiley, chief executive of Pure Digital. The State Street decision comes less than a week before Coinbase, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, is set to go public through a direct listing. The group said earlier this week it had 56m verified users as of the end of the first quarter, with 6.1m performing transactions on average every month. Quarterly trading volume was $335bn.
