Hidden Road Launches OTC Prime Brokerage For Digital Assets

October 13, 2022 - Hidden Road, the credit network for institutional investors, announced the public launch of its over-the-counter (OTC) prime brokerage for digital assets, for both US and international counterparties.

Hidden Road's credit network facilitates OTC trading between market participants, with trades executed bilaterally between counterparties and intermediated by Hidden Road as the credit counterparty. Hidden Road's OTC prime brokerage will further institutional adoption of digital assets by giving counterparties full ownership and control over their execution technology, liquidity and custodian choice for both fiat and digital assets.

"Listening to our institutional counterparts, there was clear demand for Hidden Road to launch the first real prime brokerage solution for OTC trading of digital assets," says Michael Higgins, Global Head of Business Development for Hidden Road. "The market was in need of a truly conflict-free prime broker, one without a proprietary trading desk, OTC liquidity desk or market making operation.

"Hidden Road provides a credit network and a true prime brokerage solution for digital assets, encompassing margin netting, financing of trading and centralised market access to leading global OTC liquidity providers."

In conjunction with Hidden Road's support for exchange-traded products, the new OTC prime brokerage service enables spread optimisation for the buy side and brokerage communities, and a distribution channel for institutional market makers.

Their approach nets positions across all liquidity providers and venues with a view to introducing operational and capital efficiencies while reducing credit risk, settlement risk and operational risk.

Hidden Road's digital asset prime brokerage also aims to eliminate the need to onboard and negotiate multiple bilateral relationships by increasing access to liquidity and expanding distribution,.

The majority of the top 25 global liquidity providers are available on the platform. The initial liquidity providers on the platform include, but are not limited to:

• AlphaLab 
• DV Chain
• Enigma Securities
• GSR
• FBG
• Flow Traders
• Da Vinci Derivatives
• OSL
• Portofino
• Profluent
• Virtu
• Wincent
• Wintermute
• XBTO Global

The following ISVs are supporting Hidden Road OTC:

• 4OTC 
• CoinRoutes 
• Elwood Tech
• Gold-i
• Reactive
• Talos

The following venues/ECNs are supporting Hidden Road OTC:

• 24x
• Crossover Markets
• Cypator
• Enclave Markets 
• Finery Markets
• Spotex

Hidden Road was founded in 2018 by Marc Asch, formerly with SAC Capital and Point72 Asset Management. The firm started with foreign-exchange services and then expanded into digital assets. It is based in the British Virgin Islands.

In July 2022, Hidden Road completed a $50 million funding round that included Citadel Securities and the investment arms of the cryptocurrency exchanges FTX Trading Ltd. and Coinbase Global Inc.