In a live interview on TV’s “First Mover,” Jamil Nazarali, CEO of EDX Markets, talked about what his new Crypto Exchange means for institutional investors and why crypto’s idea of being an asset class without a middleman is unlikely to last.
As more and more institutions offer cryptocurrency to their big clients, a new crypto exchange put together by Wall Street heavyweights wants to use intermediaries to bring traditional finance into trading digital assets.
Jamil Nazarali, CEO of crypto exchange EDX Markets, said in a news correspondence interview “First Mover” on Tuesday that his exchange is bringing “the best practices from traditional finance” into the world of crypto. He said this will make trading digital assets “safer, faster, and more efficient” while lowering costs.
The Crypto Exchange will work with institutional accounts and is backed by some of the biggest names in finance, such as Charles Schwab (SCHW), Fidelity Digital Assets, and Citadel Securities, where Nazarali used to work as a senior executive.
“Investors in the EDX Markets are leaders in their fields and are in it for the long haul,” Nazarali said. “They’re not investing to make a quick buck.” “They are trying to invest to build the infrastructure of the future.”
Even though the Crypto Exchange won’t have direct customer accounts at first, Nazarali said, “In the long term or even the medium term, we will build that capability.”
Nazarali says that traditional intermediaries will not go away, even though blockchains and cryptocurrencies were made in part to get rid of the need for them.
“The truth is that you’ll need a middleman either way,” he said. He also said that the main goal of his company is to get crypto investors the best price on the market.
“We’ll take the best price on the market from the market makers and match it to the orders that come in from customers,” Nazarali said.
Nazarali had told CoinDesk in the past that the company will only offer “a handful of tokens,” including bitcoin (BTC), to avoid government oversight.
Traditional Wall Street players are also getting into cryptocurrency, but Nazarali doesn’t mind. Nazarali said that the Nasdaq market’s latest push into crypto won’t put his exchange in direct competition, but it does show “a great development in the market.”
It will “bring in more institutional players,” he said, and that’s a good thing.
