Institutional market structure takes shape in digital assets
Every major asset class follows a familiar path as it matures. Trading begins bilaterally, relationships are fragmented, settlement is bespoke and capital allocation proceeds inefficiently. Over time, professional liquidity concentrates around regulated, wholesale venues, intermediaries bring together buyers and sellers and post-trade processes become standardized, netted and predictable.
Crypto is now entering that phase, and it’s setting the foundation for an exciting new class of tokenized financial markets.
With a history dating back to 1866, TP ICAP is the world’s largest interdealer broker and a central part of wholesale market infrastructure across rates, FX, credit, equities, energy and commodities. Operating in 28 countries, the firm has long been a leading source of liquidity and execution in traditional markets, sitting at the center of institutional price discovery.
Today, TP ICAP is applying its expertise to digital assets, helping the crypto market transition from a network of bilateral relationships into a functioning wholesale market.
“We connect the world’s major financial, energy and commodities markets,” Duncan Trenholme, managing director and global co-head of digital assets at TP ICAP, told Coindesk. “We’re deeply connected to banks, hedge funds and asset managers. What we’re doing in crypto is building the familiar wholesale market structure our clients expect and require, to support the growth of a new asset class.”
From bilateral trading to wholesale infrastructure
Wholesale trading did not emerge in traditional markets overnight. Fixed income, FX and over-the-counter derivatives markets all evolved away from direct, name-to-name trading as volumes grew and balance-sheet efficiency became a constraint. Interdealer brokers emerged to aggregate liquidity, preserve anonymity and intermediate between buyers and sellers. Post-trade processes followed, enabling standardized settlement cycles, netting and operational scale.
Institutional crypto asset trading still reflects its early stage. Many institutional trades remain bilateral, requiring participants to onboard to multiple venues, negotiate contracts one-by-one and manage settlement across a complex web of counterparties and custodians. That fragmentation absorbs capital and limits scalability.
The growing presence of prime brokers in crypto markets has been a foundational evolutionary step for the market and an important development in encouraging liquidity, by centralizing interaction, to coalesce around a true wholesale market.
Acting as the counterparty, not the lender
On TP ICAP’s Fusion Digital Assets platform, trades are executed on a matched principal basis. For each transaction, TP ICAP intermediates between the two sides, becoming the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer, without taking directional market risk.
This provides a wholesale market infrastructure, allowing clients to trade now and settle later within defined settlement cycles. This mirrors how wholesale markets function across traditional asset classes and materially improves capital efficiency, particularly when combined with multilateral netting.
“You can face TP ICAP,” Trenholme said. “We act as the counterparty to both sides of the trade. That simplifies the market structure and dramatically reduces the number of bilateral relationships clients need to manage.”
By centralizing settlement flows, TP ICAP replaces dozens of bilateral relationships with a single point of interaction. Clients are free to use their custodian of choice, while benefiting from a predictable settlement process and far greater operational simplicity.
A model proven at scale
While the matched principal model is far from new to TP ICAP, it’s standard practice in the vast majority of the asset classes in which the interdealer giant operates. In 2025 alone, the firm matched and settled more than $200 trillion using this model across its traditional businesses.
“This is a structure we’ve used for decades,” Trenholme said. “It’s been tested through multiple market cycles and periods of stress. Bringing that model into crypto is about applying proven wholesale infrastructure to a market that’s ready for it.”
The numbers matter because wholesale markets are ultimately about scale, resilience and trust. Institutions adopt infrastructure that is familiar, well understood and operationally robust.
Why pre-funding came first
When TP ICAP launched Fusion Digital Assets, the firm operated strictly on a fully funded model. That was a deliberate reflection of where crypto markets were at the time: less standardized, operationally uneven and still developing institutional norms around custody and settlement.
“As the market matures, market structure evolves,” Trenholme said. “Pre-funding made sense early on. But it’s capital intensive and not how wholesale markets operate at-scale.”
As infrastructure improved and institutional participation deepened, TP ICAP was able to transition Fusion Digital Assets toward a matched principal model that more closely resembles its traditional markets. In other asset classes, this transition marked the tipping point from which markets could scale efficiently.
Netting, timing and capital efficiency
One of the defining features of wholesale markets is what happens after execution. By intermediating settlement, TP ICAP enables multilateral netting of exposures across trades and counterparties, reducing settlement flows and capital tied up in operational buffers. For institutional traders, this directly improves balance sheet efficiency.
Distributed ledger technology adds a further dimension. On-chain settlement allows obligations to be measured and settled with far greater precision than traditional post-trade systems.
As digital asset markets move toward near continuous trading, that precision becomes increasingly valuable.
A blueprint for on-chain market infrastructure
The formation of a wholesale crypto market does more than support spot trading in Bitcoin and Ether. It provides a blueprint for how market infrastructure could work across a broader universe of tokenized assets.
As tokenization accelerates, multiple asset classes, stablecoins, FX instruments, tokenized securities and real-world assets, are likely to settle on-chain. Wholesale markets will no longer require a single settlement cycle. Some products may settle hourly or daily, and others at the close of regional trading windows around the world.
That flexibility fundamentally changes how institutions manage liquidity. Precise, programmable settlement cycles reduce the need to over-fund positions and flatten the effective funding curve. Treasury management becomes more dynamic, with capital freed up to deploy where and when it is needed most.
“Wholesale crypto markets aren’t just about crypto,” Trenholme said. “They’re about establishing an infrastructure that can support multiple asset classes settling on-chain, with greater precision and efficiency than we’ve ever had before.”
Today, TP ICAP’s Fusion Digital Assets platform offers matched principal spot trading in major crypto-fiat pairs, with stablecoins and “on-chain FX” to come. Together, those components position the venue not simply as a crypto market, but as the wholesale market infrastructure of tomorrow.