By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
LGO Markets wants to provide institutional investors with a reliable exchange platform and offers a new approach to crypto services.
Currently, a lot of crypto experts believe that the future of the industry greatly depends on the involvement of institutions. Institutional trading still continues to gain momentum which ensures a necessity to introduce new ways and approaches to investing which could attract the attention of this growing group of the industry’s participants.
Crypto Custody Welcomes the New Player
One of the newest players is the New Jersey-based platform known as LGO Markets. As the platform was launched with limited functionality, now its clients can fund and trade through their registered accounts but it is planned that soon spot trading will be added. The launch of spot trading in Bitcoin is scheduled for March 11.
As it has been revealed by the platform’s CEO Hugo Renaudin, 10 institutional clients have already joined LGO Markets. They are hedge funds, crypto businesses, market makers. But the greatest interest is observed from the side of over-the-counter (OTC) trading desks. Moreover, 56 clients are to join the platforms soon as at the moment they are preparing for it.
The company views its mission in providing clients with a reliable environment where they will have an opportunity to feel comfortable even when they are just making their first steps in the crypto sphere.
The model of LGO looks like a combination of the best features of centralized and decentralized exchanges. The funds will be stored by clients independently. But at the same time, the order book will run on a central server and the clearing company will be responsible for the settlement of the trades.
LGO wants to prevent market manipulations and data tampering that’s why all orders will be timestamped and visible to everyone as they will be recorded on the blockchain. Such an approach will guarantee transparency and security for the participants.
To join LGO’s platform investors need to create a multi-signature wallet which utilizes three private keys to operate. One key will be kept by a client, the second one – by the platform and the third one is to be held by a Swiss company, Altcoinomy that has been chosen to act as the clearing agent. Another requirement for investors is having a Signature Bank account as this bank is an official bank of LGO.
Tough Competition on the Way
Nevertheless, the platform understands that it will need to do its best to survive in the conditions of very severe competition. Let us remind that, for example, American financial services giant Fidelity revealed last month that its cryptocurrency trading and custody platform is in the “final testing and process refinement periods”. Another company to have developed a special product for institutional traders is TokenSoft Inc. that introduced the Beta version of its new Knox Wallet specifically designed for use by enterprises.
Meanwhile, the number of strong players is growing together with the number of potential clients who are continuously entering the market. Speaking about this issue, Renaudin stated:
“There are roughly 400 institutional clients that are currently trading in the cryptocurrency market. We estimated this by talking to the crypto-friendly banks. Among these 400, it’s mostly hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, OTC brokers, a few family offices, asset managers and purely crypto players like lending providers that consider trading bitcoin as a part of their business.”
Bearing in mind its peculiar approach to crypto services for investors, LGO is very optimistic about the future of its platform. To make the platform look more trustworthy, LGO will be audited by PwC.