Crossover Markets Group, established last year by two former Jefferies executives, announced on Tuesday the launch of CROSSx, an execution-only cryptocurrency Electronic Communication Network (ECN).
Crossover Markets Is Backed by Retail FX/CFDs Brokers
The launch came after Crossover Markets received a seed investment of an undisclosed amount from a consortium of market participants, most of which are traditional financial services companies. The backers include major names in the forex and contracts for differences (CFDs) retail brokerage space, including Exness, Pepperstone, Think Markets, TMGM, Flow Traders, Gate.io, GMO Internet Group, Nomura's Laser Digital, Two Sigma, and Wintermute Ventures.
"We are delighted with the financial backing of global industry leaders in retail brokerage, market making, quantitative trading , banking, and crypto-native firms," said Crossover's CEO, Brandon Mulvihill. "Our consortium partners share our vision and have paved the way to create scale and opportunities for other industry participants to join our platform and participate in future rounds."
Mulvihill co-founded Crossover with Anthony Mazzarese, who holds the Chief Commercial Officer role. Both of them were former executives at the Prime Brokerage division of Jefferies.
A Crypto ECN
CROSSx is a uniquely positioned product for cryptocurrency. While ECNs are very popular in the forex trading market, nothing like this has been built on an industrial scale for the aggressively growing cryptocurrency market.
The new platform of Crossover claims to decrease trading costs, improve execution quality and enhance market data capabilities. Moreover, it allows institutions to choose their own credit counterparties to decouple trade execution from custody and brokerage, thus avoiding any conflict of interest.
According to the official press release, CROSSx's matching engine has a sub-20 microsecond latency and a throughput of millions of messages per second, assuring faster pricing and trade executions.
Additionally, the new platform added liquidity customization features, allowing clients to create 'dark and lit' liquidity pools. Further, it supports anonymous, disclosed, and semi-disclosed trading over one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many connections.
Speaking on behalf of Exness on its decision to invest in the CROSSx Crypto ECN, Damian Bunce, Chief Customer Officer, said: “The market structure for Crypto Trading is evolving right in front of our eyes and we know from history that over the last two decades as FX, Bond and Equities market structures evolved and digitized, those structures presented many attractive investment opportunities".
"Our investment in Crossover Markets is our belief in the adoption and acceleration of the Crypto industry. Unlike traditional assets such as FX, where market structures were defined between institutions and then migrated for use by retail, crypto is the opposite, defined by retail and now steadily adopted by institutions. As a Top 10 retail liquidity provider of crypto, we have a very natural seat at the table in the evolution of this market."
