Talos, a technology provider for the institutional trading of digital assets, has launched a new feature on its platform that allows its clients to define and trade synthetic pairs that include FX and crypto “legs.”
Talos, a technology provider for the institutional trading of digital assets, has launched a new feature on its platform that allows its clients to define and trade synthetic pairs that include FX and crypto “legs.”
As a result, Talos’s clients can now trade or provide prices in pairs like BTC-EUR by automatically combining the FX (ex EUR-USD) and the digital asset (ex BTC-USD) legs to derive a cross rate with a tighter spread.
Non-US clients looking to trade between their home currency and crypto will typically encounter wider – if any – spreads. This forces them to trade via more liquid pairs like BTC-USD. Talos’s new functionality significantly streamlines the FX leg, reducing the operational burden and the associated market risk for such scenarios and improving execution costs considerably.
“Digital assets are traded worldwide by the retail sector and institutions alike, but the majority of the liquidity remains in USD-denominated pairs,” says Anton Katz, co-founder and CEO of Talos. “Given the rapidly increasing number of non-US institutional clients we’re now seeing, the ability to trade seamlessly from any fiat currency to any cryptocurrency should significantly reduce trading costs and bring further international players to our platform.”
By marrying FX and digital assets, Talos delivers an efficient, end-to-end solution that effectively gives an investor direct access to a global pool of both FX and crypto liquidity, as well as the ability to move efficiently from asset to asset. Additionally, through Talos’s digital asset trading platform, investors can see all active trading counterparties along with available quantities across all supported FX and synthetic markets. Using the platform’s FX capabilities, the system will arrive at a single cross-rate price based on the quantity required and will then concurrently execute both the FX and crypto components of the transaction.
Katz adds: “We believe that the rise of initiatives like DeFi, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and the tokenisation of traditional asset classes will benefit from a unified technology supporting all of them. The addition of the synthetic crossing functionality is yet another example of our commitment to help institutions interact with this new world through a familiar lens.”
Publicly launched at the beginning of October after a year of live trading with clients, the Talos platform is built exclusively to support end-to-end trading of digital assets – from onboarding to price discovery, execution and settlement – including bilateral access to liquidity providers. Talos offers solutions to meet the needs of both investors and financial service providers, including prime brokers, OTC liquidity providers, lenders, custodians, and exchanges. Clients access the Talos platform via API or GUI, and it is highly configurable to their unique workflow requirements.
