BitGo, a US based company that manages roughly 20% of all Bitcoin (BTC) trades, has rolled out BitGo Prime, a new enterprise focused on institutional trading services. BitGo stated that the latest prime broker platform will offer numerous features aimed at institutional investors.
Following the roll out of institutional level cryptocurrency lending service in March 2020, the latest full-service platform will offer institutional level cryptocurrency lending, custody services and trading platform.
In addition to the institutional cryptocurrency lending facilities rolled out recently, BitGo has also joined hands with institutional traders.
Nick Carmi, chief of financial services at BitGo and the new CEO of BitGo Prime, stated that facility for institutional level trading has been made available for BitGo clients, privately, under beta phase, for many months:
“BitGo has always been focused on servicing institutional investors. What’s different here is that we’ve launched a prime broker business to deeply integrate the services of lending, trading and custody.”
BitGo states that the latest platform permits trading from insured cold storage, a facility provided specifically to Prime clients of BitGo. Notably, clients’ assets are safely held by BitGo Trust, a regulated custodian. At the time of launch, BitGo Prime will offer trading in top-two cryptocurrencies, namely Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC), and the US dollar. Carmi stated “We will be adding support for the top 12 most active coins very shortly.”
BitGo, under the framework of its latest institutional-grade prime platform, guarantees anonymity for traders. BitGo Prime clients will stay “completely anonymous” at the time of trading, and the platform will act at the sole counterparty.
Carmi detailed that traders using BitGo Prime platform will remain anonymous to market makers, even though they will be going through KYC, Anti-Money Laundering and other compliance process at the time of opening an account.
“The client is not anonymous to BitGo — they’ve been fully vetted under KYC/AML procedures. They remain undisclosed to the market and market makers. This is important so as not to tip off who may be making large trades and is standard practice with prime brokers in more traditional asset classes.”
The news has come at a time when there is a rising interest from institutional investors in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
In April 2020, digital asset management fund Grayscale reported that the first-quarter has turned out to be its best quarter, with a major portion of fresh capital arriving from institutional investors.
Over 90% of investments received by Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust is from institutional players.
