Cboe to Add List of Partners to Grow Its Digital Assets Business – Blockworks

Cboe Global Markets taps roster of partners to help grow its digital assets business, just months after closing its acquisition of ErisX.

The company is looking to expand its crypto spot and futures capabilities to fill what executives called “a huge gap” in the space of providing market intermediaries with a place of trust for its retail clients and institutional.

ErisX operates a US-based digital asset spot market, as well as a futures exchange and clearing house regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). cboewhich owns the world’s largest options exchange, completed its acquisition of the company in May in order to enter the digital asset and derivatives markets and is set to rebrand ErisX as Cboe Digital.

The planned new partners, each of which intends to take minority stakes in Cboe, are B2C2, DRW, GSR, Hidden Road, IMC, Interactive Brokers, Jane Street, Jump Crypto, Optiver, Robinhood, tastytrade and Virtu Financial. Leaders did not reveal the precise size of the stakes.

Investors join other previously announced partner companies, such as Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy Digital, NYDIG and Webull. Cboe plans to form a digital advisory committee made up of partner companies.

The new group of partners includes retail order flow providers, some of the largest market makers in the spot crypto world and other market makers more focused on derivatives pricing and trading, a Cboe chief strategy officer John Deters told Blockworks.

“We very intentionally established a diverse group of partners,” he said. “It’s this kind of mix that we believe creates an ideal and healthy mix of participants, each with a slightly different purpose and coming together simultaneously to create a vibrant and liquid market.”

ErisX and Cboe product roadmap

ErisX offers cash-settled futures on bitcoin and ether. It offers spot transactions on bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, litecoin and USD Coin.

Regarding the company’s product roadmap, ErisX President John Palmer told Blockworks that his “next push” is to gain CFTC approval to trade futures contracts based on margin. Cboe hopes to roll out these products by the end of the year, he said.

In 2023 and 2024, the company will look to offer additional futures and spot transactions for tokens beyond the five digital assets currently offered. Although Palmer did not name the specific assets he would be looking to offer, he did note that he would be considering other “top-traded tokens.”

“We certainly want to deliver that very quickly and have a platform where participants can trade spot and derivatives and really take advantage of capital efficiency by making sure everything is clear in our trading room. compensation,” Palmer said.

Using market data based on actionable bid and offer prices in the spot crypto market, Cboe Digital also plans to develop a benchmark data feed to help market participants assess the prices of execution of cryptography, Deters said.

“Our industry is going digital for the long term, and so we’re making sure our platform is built for that future, helping market players and our customers engage with the market and helping them find opportunities. digitization and interaction with their products is a ‘critical’ initiative for us and will keep us busy for quite some time,” Deters said.

Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your inbox each evening. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter now.