Caspian, a startup developing an institutional-grade cryptocurrency trading platform, has raised US$16 million in a pre-sale of its CSP token. The company’s platform has just exited beta testing and is now live, the startup said on Monday.
Caspian, a joint venture between Tora, a global cloud-based front-to-back technology provider to buy side institutions, and Kenetic, a blockchain and cryptocurrency investment firm, is building an ecosystem to enable professional traders and investors to operate more efficiently and improve their performance.
The company is going after the booming crypto asset trading industry which has seen explosive growth over the past year with average daily exchange-trading volume across all crypto assets surpassing US$18 billion and total estimated market capitalization for blockchain instruments exceeding US$325 billion equivalent as of April 2018.
Yet, crypto investors continue to lack a number of crucial tools that are necessary for the space to reach its potential, the startup argues in its whitepaper. These include professional-grade trade execution, compliance, position and risk management, and reporting functionality.
Caspian aims to fill that void by offering a complete asset management solution that covers the full lifecycle of the trade and which includes a fully developed order and execution management system (OEMS), position management system (PMS), and risk management system (RMS).
The company intends to offer a single interface into all major cryptocurrency exchanges, a complete suite of sophisticated trading algorithms, real-time and historical P&L and exposure tracking and professional customer service. The system is being designed to meet the needs of institutional investors who need to execute trades and maintain target allocations across many exchanges.
Caspian is currently connected to over 24 different exchanges including Binance, Bitmex, Bitfinex, Gemini, Coinbase, Huobi and OKex. The company said 170 institutional-grade customers have shown interest in on-boarding the platform, and 15 customers are already using it.
Pre-sale investors and customers include Galaxy Investment Partners, Global Advisors, Octagon Strategy, Kenetic, Techemy Capital and Bletchley Park. Caspian recently entered into strategic partnerships with Blocktower and Galaxy Digital Capital Management, led by Bitcoin evangelist Mike Novogratz.
“We believe institutional investors will drive exponential growth in the cryptocurrency market, and Caspian are becoming a big part of this story,” said Novogratz. “We’re excited to be in partnership with them and expect exciting developments over the next few months.”