The institutions are coming
The SIX group is the company behind the largest Swiss Stock Exchange and settlement center. They are now investing in a company that builds cryptocurrency infrastructure. Omniex, is the company that focuses on increasing demand from institutional customers.
That a large group such as SIX is investing in cryptocurrency, is a trend that has been going on for several years now. We see ‘old-finance’ help develop or invests in new technology. In this case for example, cryptocurrency. We see similar efforts from ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. J.P Morgan, a venerable bank, now offers customized customer products for the crypto industry.
SIX now joins a consortium of VC companies, that inject $14 into Omniex, based in Silicon Valley. The business plan for Omniex is to create a platform for institutional customers, which collects price data from all the major exchanges and offers customers to trade in automatic routing or in a basket. This means that large funds and investor communities can buy and sell, where prices are best at all times, just like they do on the stock market. This will create better liquidity and spread on the larger stock exchanges, which can be positive for the market overall.
Different approach
“You can easily test different products on private investors, but if you want to build something for large institutions, you have to take into account their needs and experiences from other markets.”
CEO, Hu Liang of Ominex, is clear on who their customers are and what they demand. He knows this very well, with his 16 years of experience from State Street, one of the largest players of settlement products on Wall Street.
This fits in with the strategy of the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), which is to list, trade, settle and store cryptocurrencies. By using Omniex’s SDX, customers of the stock exchange will have access to the price picture and liquidity in other markets as well. This means that if there is a better seller of bitcoin somewhere else than SDX, the customer will easily access via SDX’s dashboard, a seller on, for example, Binance.
SDX has today started to tokenize equities and bonds, but will soon move into both real estate and art.