Crypto news

All the latest developments in digital assets from across the globe

CME Group to introduce event contracts on Bitcoin futures

The Chicago-headquartered derivatives exchange will expand its suite of event contracts to include Bitcoin futures on March 13, pending regulatory review.

‘These contracts, which track the daily price moves of our deeply liquid benchmark Bitcoin futures, offer an innovative, lower-cost way for investors to trade their views on the up or down price moves of bitcoin,’ said Tim McCourt (pictured), global head of equity and FX products at CME Group.

First launched in September 2022, the contracts will allow individuals to trade their views on daily up or down price moves in some benchmark futures markets, beginning with E-mini S&P 500, E-mini Nasdaq-100, E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average, E-mini Russell 2000, crude oil, natural gas, gold, silver, copper and Euro FX.

Valued up to US$20 per contract, these daily options on futures enable participants to know their maximum profit or loss when entering a trade.

Spirit Blockchain strikes partnership with Valour

Spirit Blockchain Capital, a Canadian provider of digital asset structured products, has tapped Valour as the lead order in the private placement currently being undertaken by the Company.

Valour is a public blockchain-focused technology company that aims to bridge the gap between traditional capital markets, Web3, and DeFi with three business lines - Valour Asset Management, Valour Ventures, and Valour Infrastructure.

Olivier Roussy Newton (pictured), CEO of Valour, intends to seek a seat on the Spirit board following the closing of the private placement.

In addition, Spirit CEO Lewis Bateman will join the board of directors of Valour and guide in its product development. Over the following six months, the two firms will also establish objectives, key results and performance indicators for the spartnership and execute definitive agreements.

‘This partnership symbolizes Valour’s commitment to building the leading decentralized digital asset management firm in the world,’ said Newton.

Credit Suisse leads Taurus’ blockchain funding round

Taurus, a digital asset infrastructure provider for financial institutions in Europe, has secured US$65 million in a Series B capital raise from strategic investors.

The Series B round was led by Credit Suisse and includes participation from new institutional investors such as Deutsche Bank, Pictet Group, Cedar Mundi Ventures, as well as from Series A investors, Arab Bank Switzerland and Investis, a stock-listed real estate group.

The funds will be used to support the company’s growth strategy across three main priorities including the expansion of its work force with top engineering talent to further develop its platform, as well as sales to expand the reach of its infrastructure solutions across Europe, UAE and soon in the Americas and South-East Asia. Some of the capital will be used to implement ‘the most stringent security, risk and compliance requirements across product lines, processes and organizations’.

According to André Helfenstein (pictured), CEO, Credit Suisse (Switzerland), the strategic partnership with Taurus is ‘a cornerstone of the Swiss Bank division's digital assets strategy with the ambition to become the leading Swiss bank in that space’.

‘We continue to embrace new and innovative technologies and expect to soon launch several digital asset services for clients both on the issuing and the investment side,’ he said.

Taurus’ digital assets platform offers custody via TaurusPROTECT which provides ultra-secure storage and transfer of hundreds of digital assets including support for staking, decentralised finance (DeFi), tokenised securities, and digital currencies; tokenization via Taurus-CAPITAL which enables issuance, deployment, and lifecycle management of any type of tokenized assets (equity, debt, structured products, physical assets, NFTs); as well as a regulated marketplace allowing the trading of tokenized securities on the company’s T-DX platform.

Taurus already works with more than 25 financial institutions and corporate clients in eight countries and three continents, including systemically important financial institutions, retail and online banks, private banks, crypto-banks, investment banks, and broker-dealers, said Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner of Taurus.

‘Raising USD 65mn in the current market environment tells a lot about the quality of Taurus' people and products,’ he said.

SynOption launches portfolio risk management solution

The Singapore-based digital assets trading firm has rolled out its platform for portfolio management in February, which allows ‘institutional and sophisticated investors to view their risks in a modular, efficient, and metricized manner specifically on non-linear products such as options, exotics and structured products’.

‘Clients have increasingly bigger OTC portfolios, and SynOption provides a solution to view risk across exchanges and OTC, static and dynamic portfolio risk analytics, OTC trade booking and lifecycle management and dynamic portfolio setup,’ said Says Anchal Jain (right), CEO of SynOption.

The platform provides portfolio views, market data, trade booking, all via a GUI or API based access. The lifecycle management module gives the user the ability to book deals, exercises, expiries, as well as to manage fixings and barriers. The administrator module allows for customized configuration of portfolios and provides rights to view or edit portfolios.

‘The initial product covers FX and digital assets markets, executed via OTC or exchanges, and products starting from simple cash trades to vanilla options, exotic options, and structured products. We intend to add more exchanges, commodities, and other product types in upcoming releases, according to Gurpreet Chhatwal, COO of SynOption.

WeQuant introduces AI-powered cryptocurrency trading platform

WeQuant has launched a platform designed to provide global crypto trading users with strategies 24/7 using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, including classical grid, martingale, channel oscillation, and AI-based strategies.

Developed by WeQuant, a US crypto infrastructure provider, the platform uses AI-driven big data research to quantify and model different data sources, such as K-line patterns, macro data, derivative data, and on-chain data.

This information is then filtered through AI algorithms to develop the convenient trading strategies, reducing the impact of human emotions on investment decisions.

The company has also undergone ‘extensive preparation and internal testing’ to provide high-frequency trading and quantitative arbitrage strategies for cryptocurrencies and other financial derivatives.

Cumberland Labs launches Hashnote to streamline structured products

As ‘the first fully regulated, institutionalgrade investment management platform for DeFi’, Hashnote is backed with US$5m of investment from Cumberland Labs, a blockchain incubator formed by trading firm DRW and its crypto asset arm Cumberland in 2022.

The platform offers full regulatory and KYC/AML compliance for a range of investment structures including yield generation, downside protection and leveraged upside products.

It aims to simplify the complexities of DeFi while ensuring verified transactions with every counterparty by combining the familiarity and regulatory compliance of existing traditional finance fund infrastructure with on-chain security.

‘Accessing crypto markets and structured products through DeFi is currently overly complex, typically unregulated, and rife with useability and platform risk,’ said Tama Churchouse (pictured), head of strategy and business development at Cumberland Labs.

‘Given the multiple setbacks that have characterized the space in the past twelve months, we believe the market needs a solution like Hashnote. Coming from a TradFi derivative structuring background, I know this is a sorely needed product and am onboarding as Hashnote’s first client.’

Marex makes first foray into DeFi products

Marex Solutions - a division of Marex specialising in the manufacture and distribution of customised derivative products – has entered into a partnership with MEV Capital, an EU-based digital asset manager specialised in finding and extracting value from the burgeoning Decentralised Finance (DeFi) market.

Under the collaboration agreement, the two companies have designed and deployed new digital assets products to provide on-chain solutions for professional clients.

Marex’s choice of MEV Capital was driven by the firm's expertise and proven track record in the DeFi market, as it seeks to ‘bring new and exciting opportunities for clients looking to diversify their portfolios and capitalise on the growth of digital assets’.

‘Manufacturing innovative derivatives with MEV Capital's expertise will allow both parties to create new products that combine the best of centralised and decentralised finance,’ said Harry Benchimol (pictured), co-head of derivatives engine, Marex Solutions.

Laurent Bourquin, managing partner of MEV Capital, said: ‘Our collaboration with Marex is a real leap forward for the institutionalisation of DeFi. It will facilitate its access and anchor the positioning of digital assets as a new asset class for the years to come.’

Yield App acquires US structured product provider

Digital wealth platform Yield App has acquired Trofi Group, a crypto platform that offers structured product solutions, to capitalise on ‘growing investor demand for enhanced yield investment opportunities’.

Yield App adds four new structured product strategies offering the opportunity to ‘capture upside across a range of market conditions’. These include dual currency structures which can help acquire a cryptocurrency at a lower price at a predetermined point in the future, while also earning yield; a range structures to generate yield with a view that markets will remain within a specified price range; sharkfin structures targeted at investors with a moderately bullish view on future prices, which will pay a guaranteed minimum coupon with the potential to generate a high yield at maturity; and target products designed for investors with a bullish view on the future price of a cryptocurrency.

Following the acquisition, Yield App will be launching ‘Trofi, powered by Yield App,’ a beta version of a dedicated investment app which will allow access to Yield App's first crypto structured products.

‘Structured products have been a core offering under wealth management for years. But in crypto, structured products have not yet gained the prominence they have in traditional finance,’ said chief investment officer of Yield App, Lucas Kiely (pictured). ‘As cryptocurrency markets mature, we find ourselves at a perfect inflection point to introduce digital asset structured products that are built with the same methodology and benefits as an exciting alternative for investors with different risk appetites and objectives.’

Trofi Group was founded in 2021 by Andrew Lam, a former FX Options Trader at HSBC Global Banking and Markets.

Coinbase and GenTwo Digital announce partnership for custody and execution

GenTwo Digital, the Zug-based subsidiary of GenTwo, has partnered with publicly-listed cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, to expand the investment universe on digital assets available for professional investors.Under the partnership Coinbase crypto assets to be wrapped in bankable financial investment products to enable financial intermediaries to issue passive and actively management certificates (AMCs) - any financial intermediary can create white labelled investment products in collaboration with GenTwo Digital and execute via Coinbase’s platform.

Coinbase Prime is a fully integrated platform built specifically for institutions to support the entire transaction lifecycle including advanced multi-venue agency trade execution for 200 assets, custody for more than 360 assets, financing, staking and staking infrastructure, data and analytics, and reporting.

Institutions can access Coinbase Prime directly via a user interface or as an integrated platform via APIs to offer crypto related products such as ETPs and ETFs, custodial solutions, or brokerage for their institutional, private wealth, and retail clients.

‘These instruments will benefit from execution services through Coinbase multi-venue execution platform, and assets will be held 1:1 in segregated cold-wallets for optimum security,’ said Guillaume Chatain, head of Emea institutional sales at Coinbase.

Coinbase Institutional powers several institutions including involved in the digital assets market including BlackRock, Google, Wisdom Tree, 21 Shares, Grayscale, PIMCO, Brevan Howard Digital, Invesco, GSA Capital, Lakestar, and Millennium Global.