Tassat, a provider of financial technologies and products for traditional and digital asset markets and Blockfills, a specialist in digital asset electronic market making, trading and prime brokerage, are partnering to introduce an institutional Trade at Settlement (TAS) product for spot bitcoin (XBT/USD).
This product, which is expected to be available for trading in mid-December, enables institutions to submit block orders in bitcoin at defined price spreads from the mid-market, at three specific times during each day: 15:00 Hong Kong Time, 15:00 Central European Time (Paris) and 15:30 Central Standard Time (Chicago).
TAS, widely used in derivatives markets for other asset classes, is a specific type of electronic order book that allows buyers and sellers to trade at, or near to, a settlement price which is established during a discrete fixing period. This model helps eliminate slippage in execution and uncertainty by giving participants a definite price to trade around. This is in contrast to execution on retail spot exchanges, which can be laden with volatility, sudden price movements and significantly wider spreads.
The settlement price at each window will be derived from Tassat’s robust bitcoin reference rates, based on executable, aggregated institutional-size quotes from over ten leading global OTC digital asset market makers. The Blockfills trading platform will handle the order flow, matching, execution and settlement of these trades, utilising its institutional-grade electronic trading infrastructure.
Orders may be submitted on the Blockfills trading platform for a given TAS settlement time immediately after the conclusion of the prior session. Orders will be matched based on time priority at each spread level. Participants will be notified of their execution level shortly after the TAS price fixing time and transactions between counterparties will be settled no later than 60 minutes from notice of the execution price.
Josh Gibson, Director of Sales, Tassat, says: “TAS provides a way to offset the risk of price movements on their futures positions and/or rebalance the gamma on option positions with no risk of excessive slippage. With the growth of digital asset derivatives, participants of all kinds will need new and efficient ways to hedge their positions.”
Neil Van Huis, Director of Sales and OTC Trading at Blockfills, says: “Our goal at Blockfills is to establish a global digital asset trading and prime brokerage solution to help fuel innovation and institutional adoption of digital assets. This new TAS product will complement our existing offering of digital asset products and we look forward to leveraging on our already well- established partnership with Tassat.”
Michel Finzi, Chief Commercial Officer, Tassat, says: “We are very excited to be partnering with Blockfills to bring an important and proven execution methodology from the traditional markets to the growing digital asset marketplace. We design our reference rate products to be configurable so that they can be used for innovative products such as TAS and ultimately play a central role in the digital asset trading ecosystem.”
