Seed CX Announces Successful Launch of Digital Asset Spot Trading for Institutional Traders

News Desk 24 January 2019

2 minutes read

Institutional investors who have may have held back from trading digital assets due to concerns about regulatory oversight, technical reliability and conflicts of interest can now move forward with confidence, with today’s announcement that spot trading is now live on Seed CX. Seed CX, which began onboarding trading firms late last year, has developed a deep book of liquidity providing for best execution and minimal slippage.

Through its subsidiaries, Seed CX offers a licensed exchange for institutional trading and settlement of spot digital asset products, and plans to offer a market for CFTC-regulated digital asset derivatives.

“There is no shortage of digital asset spot trading markets, but none have our vision for creating an institutional-grade experience across technology, operations and compliance,” said Edward Woodford, co-founder and CEO of Seed CX. “We are getting very positive feedback from recently onboarded customers, and we are quickly onboarding more investors and trading firms from around the world.”

Seed CX has opened trading on BTC/USD, and ETH/USD, LTC/USD and BCH/USD pairs will start trading later this month. Among the benefits of trading the digital asset spot market on Seed CX are:

A variety of market access and connectivity options: Seed CX offers multiple forms of market access including FIX, GUI click trading and Web API. Connectivity options include direct connect at NY4, which hosts the matching engine, or at its backup at CH1; through extranet providers that have presence at NY4 and CH1; or through VPN. Participants can choose to receive market data in either binary multicast or reduced packet-size FIX format.
Variety of fiat pairs: Seed CX currently offers USD fiat trading pairs and will be expanding to EUR and JPY in mid-Q1 2019.
Margin trading: Seed CX helps investors optimize capital and manage risk. It has developed robust margin models and strong risk controls that provide leverage to market participants and allow collateral to be posted using non-traditional assets, such as digital assets.
Institutional market structure: To create greater liquidity at each price level, Seed CX has established larger tick sizes and contract sizes when compared to retail trading platforms. Further, a market-maker incentive program featuring larger and tighter quote size requirements provides deeper liquidity to participants.
Lowest fees in the industry: Seed CX’s spot market uses a maker-taker model with zero maker fees and, currently, the industry’s lowest taker fees. There are no fees to deposit and withdraw fiat or digital assets (see fee schedule).
Secure custodying of assets: All USD deposits are held in regulated US banks and are protected by FDIC insurance. Digital assets are held in Seed CX’s secure wallet infrastructure.
Robust compliance: Seed CX does not have a principal trading desk and thus does not trade against clients. Seed CX’s subsidiary, Zero Hash is a FinCEN approved Money Service Business and Money Transmitter in over two dozen U.S. states.
Account and sub-account permissioning: Seed CX participants can create any number of accounts and sub-accounts to precisely control who has trading privileges. This allows for the creation of multiple trading desks, each having multiple users with different admin, trading or viewing privileges.
Dedicated institutional coverage: A dedicated team of operational support professionals based in Chicago provide around the clock support via email or phone.

“We are excited about our early experiences with Seed CX and expect to be migrating more of our business to them, particularly as they bring on new pairs and regulated derivatives,” said Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute Trading, a London-based digital asset trading group. “What we see in Seed CX is an exchange that actually reflects how we think the markets should be: reliable, compliant, obsessed with client service, and focused on the sophisticated needs of institutional investors first and foremost.”