It’s not just BlackRock – we’ve ranked the financial world’s most exciting crypto projects – DL News

With BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, finally throwing its weight behind Bitcoin, the floodgates to institutional involvement seem to be opening.

But looking past the big guns like BlackRock and Fidelity, there is a wealth of innovation at smaller or more obscure firms.

We’ve all seen the big gestures: notably the U-turn from BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who called Bitcoin “an index of money laundering” in 2017, but in July hailed it as a tool that could “revolutionize finance” .

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As the chasm between retail and institutional crypto activity finally narrows, who best bridges that gap?

From leading brokerage houses to emerging exchanges, new native networks to Wall Street stalwarts, here is a (non-exhaustive) list of some of the most influential players.

Enclave Markets — Block Crossing Pioneer

Enclave claims to be the creator of the first fully encrypted exchange, or FEX, set up to combine the best bits of both centralized and decentralized finance.

The company started with an institutional block trading service for digital assets, Enclave Cross, which allowed players to take large positions without affecting market liquidity.

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It was followed in May 2023 by a spot trading platform for digital assets, connecting buyers and sellers through a central limit order book.

Unlike other centralized exchanges, Enclave does not use internal market makers, nor does it conduct proprietary trading or take positions against its clients.

Since the beginning of the year, Enclave Cross volumes have increased by more than 1,000% as the platform continues to scale.

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The firm uses New York-based accounting firm Marcum to conduct regular audits, ensuring that all funds within Enclave’s FEX are accounted for and not misused.

Enclave Markets CEO David Wells said: “With the digital asset industry moving further towards maturity, providing utility to professional and retail traders remains a key aspect of our core mission.”

Copper — Big player, short falter?

One of the biggest players on the list, Copper is a digital asset infrastructure provider that offers custody, trading and prime brokerage solutions, along with its ClearLoop network and Walled Garden infrastructure, covering around 96% of the global crypto market .

Founded in 2018 with buy-in from some crypto veterans and based in London, the firm became a crypto unicorn in 2022 with a Series C funding round led by Barclays Ventures and Tiger Global Management that valued the firm at around $2 billion .

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ClearLoop, the firm’s OTC trading and settlement network that reduces counterparty risk while providing clients with full coverage of digital asset exchanges, has seen strong growth with “significant increases in trading volumes and client onboarding” since the end of 2022, according to the firm’s latest update.

However, in April Copper announced a “strategic realignment” to focus on its conservation and superior services solutions, streamlining its business and replacing much of its senior management, as well as making some layoffs.

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“Buyer remains on track to be the best provider of digital asset custody and excellent services that meet the needs of institutional investors,” said CEO Dmitry Tokareve.

“But now is the time to reevaluate our business strategy and further redouble our efforts to further redouble our efforts to build the areas where we can build maximum success in transforming existing financial infrastructure.”

MatrixPort – Singapore giant with European ambitions

MatrixPort is an all-in-one crypto services platform founded and funded by Chinese crypto-billionaire Jihan Wu, the founder of Bitmain, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining chip companies.

The company is now one of Asia’s largest crypto platforms and has expanded into the European market in recent years.

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With a brokerage arm and a venture capital division, its affiliated exchange platform BIT Crypto Exchange takes on Binance in Europe, with its July 2023 registration in Lithuania as a virtual asset services provider – meaning it now has regulatory approval to accept crypto exchange and wallet to offer services.

The firm opened a Zurich office in 2019 with plans to apply for a Swiss banking license, while its venture capital division has been spreading the love, recently leading an angel funding round for OrBit, an institutional crypto-liquidity provider for options and structured products.

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In May 2023, MatrixPort announced a flagship partnership with Copper to integrate with ClearLoop. The collaboration is expected to significantly enhance Matrixport’s excellent brokerage offering.

Six digital exchanges – Integration of assets

The world’s first fully regulated digital exchange and central securities depository, SDX is the digital assets arm of SIX Swiss Exchange, Europe’s third largest stock exchange.

Led by CEO David Newns, the exchange uses Switzerland’s world-leading crypto framework, and has the ambition to create a two-track service that integrates assets across both the digital and traditional exchanges.

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In November, it came a step closer to this goal, partnering with UBS to launch the world’s first native digital bond with intended dual listing and trading on SIX Digital Exchange and SIX Swiss Exchange.

“The dual-listed digital bond effectively establishes a migration path for the market to move from issuing traditional securities to issuing native digital securities on fully regulated blockchain-based financial markets infrastructure,” Newns said.

Canton Network – Bringing blockchain to the real world

Backed by technology from global crypto giant Digital Asset, and unlike many others on this lit, Canton is neither an exchange nor a broker – instead it claims to be the world’s first privacy-enabled open blockchain- network, designed for institutional assets and built to “unlock the potential of synchronized financial markets.”

A “network of networks,” as it calls it, Canton seeks to challenge the limitations of current smart contracts.

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It can do this, for example, by combining a digital bond and a digital payment in a single transaction.

It also connects current blockchain offerings, such as Deutsche Borse’s D7 post-trade platform and Goldman Sachs’ GS DAP platform, while still maintaining privacy and permission.

The network, which launched in May with more than 30 financial services participants (including ASX, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Capgemini, Cboe Global Markets, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, S&P Global, among others), indicates a growing momentum towards the tokenization of ‘real world’ assets.

DAR – Cleaning market data

With market data becoming the new gold in conventional markets, it has received less attention in the DeFi space – but Digital Asset Research aims to change all that.

DAR, the baby of New York-based tech giant Digital Asset, was founded in 2017 to provide institutional-grade crypto research and data.

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It uses market structure analysis and research to provide an accurate and authoritative price for digital assets, using statistics including intraday and close prices, asset indicators, exchange statistics and price discovery analysis.

It offers prices, benchmarks and volume data, along with due diligence and crypto exchange control, reference data and taxonomies, blockchain and crypto yield data, and is used by clients including Bloomberg, Refinitiv and Eurex. In April, DAR also teamed up with crypto index provider MarketVector to power its index methodologies.

Other names to watch

Of course, no list of new players can be comprehensive.

Lending and credit markets in the digital asset space are becoming more mature since the failure of Three Arrows Capital, FTX and Genesis in 2022.

Institutional adoption is also gaining momentum across the spectrum: from Nomura’s Laser Digital making strategic investments – such as in the new clearinghouse Cleartoken – or Standard Chartered’s support of the digital asset custodian Zodia Custody, while blockchain platforms such as GS DAP are also profiled get

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We are also seeing new ties with some of the most established players in fintech and payments: such as the recent announcement by PayPal about its partnership with Paxos, the leading New York-regulated stablecoin, to develop PYUSD, a new stablecoin to support online payments.

And the Digital Dollar Project is hard at work developing a US central bank digital currency that could have a very real future.

Lauren McAughtry is a freelance journalist covering markets and finance in London.