Announcing Anchorage Trading + Merkle Data Acquisition

Today we’re excited to share two big pieces of news:

1. We are launching Anchorage Trading, a new crypto brokerage service for institutional investors. Anchorage clients can now buy and sell crypto through our expert traders. We’ll be continuously adding new assets going forward, including by client request. If you’re interested in learning more, please fill out this form and select Trading in your inquiry.
2. Anchorage has made its first acquisition: we are thrilled to welcome Merkle Data to our team. Merkle Data is a leading provider of risk and data solutions for crypto institutions and has earned a reputation for deep knowledge of crypto markets, unparalleled assessment of crypto liquidity, and rigorous asset pricing.

About Anchorage Trading: Institutional Crypto Brokerage Integrated with Custody

Our mission is to advance institutional participation in the digital asset class. We started by engineering the most advanced and secure Qualified Custodian, enabling institutional investors to hold digital assets securely. We went on to add support for crypto-native services like staking and governance, enabling institutional investors to use digital assets securely to generate yield and make decisions affecting their investments’ future. Anchorage Trading brings us closer to our goal of offering clients a single trusted platform for all their digital asset needs by enabling institutional investors to trade digital assets securely.

Institutional investors have many options when it comes to trading, so why start yet another brokerage service? In fact, our clients have been asking us to enable trading from the beginning. Because crypto assets are bearer assets, trading and custody are natural complements: institutional investors want to buy assets directly into custody, and sell assets directly from custody, without the pains of dealing with multiple venues or moving assets between different third party addresses. Anchorage Trading enables our clients to do exactly that, supported by our traders and with access to broad liquidity from a single account. Anchorage Trading offers efficient execution across multiple venues, routing orders to get clients the optimal price.

“As active participants in the digital asset markets, we derive great value from being able to trade from our custodian’s integrated brokerage platform — an ability that Anchorage uniquely offers. Trading directly from custody has been a critical need of institutional crypto investors for years. Anchorage gives us a level of safety, trust, and ease of use that streamlines the current brokerage/custody workflow. This allows us to both secure our digital assets and trade with confidence.”— P. Bart Stephens, Co-founder & Managing Partner of Blockchain Capital

Equally important to our clients is our trading fee structure. Today, the majority of OTC trading desks in crypto use a principal model — one where the trading desk is incentivized to quote the highest price that the client will accept, because the trading desk keeps a portion of the spread between their quoted price and the spot price. Some clients like the simplicity of this approach, as the price is agreed to up front, and the client can change their market risk exposure as soon as they complete a trade. However, the principal model keeps clients from knowing how the spreads are priced. Most clients we’ve spoken with would prefer a more transparent fee structure that enables them to see whether they’re getting a good deal or not.

That’s why Anchorage Trading charges fees as an agent rather than a principal. We charge a transparent per-trade commission starting at 10 basis points, and don’t pocket an undisclosed spread above the seller’s price.

Anchorage Trading is now open to qualifying institutional investors. If you’d like to start a conversation, please complete this form and select Trading in your inquiry.

What Comes Next

A best-in-class brokerage solution requires a team of quantitative analysts and sophisticated risk modeling capabilities, and Merkle Data’s technology is already being applied to serve our clients’ trading needs. But the Merkle Data product has many more applications than pure brokerage, and we plan to provide the most value we can to our clients from this new suite of capabilities. Part of what makes Merkle Data and Anchorage such a strong pairing is the fact that we’ve been focused on solving related problems for the same institutional clients all along.

“We are joining forces to further our shared mission of serving institutional crypto investors and strengthening the crypto financial system. For the past 18 months, Merkle Data has been building the most advanced risk and data solution on the market, while Anchorage has built the most advanced and user-friendly custody solution. We’ve long admired Anchorage’s team and product, and we couldn’t be more proud to be joining them.”— Louis Baudoin, CEO, Merkle Data

Anchorage Trading is one of many new developments the growing Anchorage team is working on, and we look forward to sharing more soon. If you’d like to join our mission, check out our Careers page.