According to a press release today, Chicago-based exchange Seed CX has launched a bitcoin spot trading market for its clients, offering a regulated platform with “a deep book of liquidity.” Clients can access the market through a web based API, a graphical user interface or the financial information exchange(FIX) protocol.
Brian Liston (left) and Edward Woodford founded Seed CX in 2015. The exchange will offer a BTC/USD trading pair, with plans to add dollar pairs for ether, litecoin and bitcoin cash by the end of the month.
Seed CX is now offering a licensed bitcoin spot trading exchange for institutional trading and settlement. At some point in the near future, it will begin offering a market for crypto derivatives regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Seed CX co-founder and CEO Edward Woodford said:
“We’re offering truly institutional level support. We are live. In February we’re going to be offering more trading pairs, so we’re going to be offering up euros and Japanese yen,”
Woodford added:
“The narrative right now is ‘low prices, low prices, low prices,’ and the question is how do we respond to this. In a sense, we’ve launched months ago [by on-boarding early clients], but now we’re getting a whole bunch of clients looking to decrease their operational risk.”
The bitcoin spot trading exchange plans to help investors with margin trading, use larger tick (minimum price movement) and contract sizes than retail trading platforms and employ tighter quote requirements for its clients. Clients can also post non-traditional assets (including digital assets) as collateral.
Rather than storing all its clients’ crypto in one wallet, Seed CX maintains segregated wallets for each client. All U.S. dollar deposits to the exchange will be stored in regulated banks and insured through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), while digital assets will be stored via Seed CX’s wallet infrastructure.
The exchange noted that it does not trade against customers (and it forbids employees from trading crypto). Its subsidiary, Zero Hash, is a Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)-registered money service business (MSB) and licensed money transmitter in nearly 30 U.S. states.
While the ongoing crypto bear market has resulted in multiple firms tightening their belts and otherwise cutting back, Woodford said both the number of clients and their composition signing for spot trading up with Seed CX has increased in the past several months.
Whereas before, interest came from crypto startups, he said that there is “now greater external money.”
Woodford added:
“It’s groups that aren’t just based in the crypto space. The price normalization hasn’t stopped legitimate large groups [from entering],”
Images courtesy of Seed CX
Comments are off this post!