Caspian Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder
A technologist at heart, Gerrit van Wingerden is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Caspian. Throughout his 20-year career he has built and lead technology teams, delivering cutting edge financial products along the way. Van Wingerden has served as the Managing Director of TORA since 2007, and before that managed the development of high-volume trading tools for hedge funds and investment banks.
Your new listing partner is CoinAll, one of the fastest-growing crypto exchanges in the world. Why did Caspian choose to list with this exchange?
CoinAll’s close affiliation with OKEx, one of the largest and most liquid exchanges in the sector, was central to making this new listing decision. CoinAll is the very first of the 100 OK Partner exchanges launched under the OKEx Open Partnership Program. CoinAll are also committed to building a fully transparent, community-run exchange platform, which empowers the community to self-manage, creating value and sharing returns altogether.
What’s more, partnering with CoinAll can also be a gateway to an eventual OKEx listing. OKEx was founded in 2017, giving it a solid track record of operation. It also has a liquid derivatives market which has sparked the interest of some of our large institutional clients. After we list with CoinAll and bring a certain number of new users to the token, it is hoped we will be eligible for listing on OKEx. A key benefit for our clients of taking this two-step approach is that their credentials can be shared among the two exchanges, which means that if you already trade on OKEx, you can log in with those credentials and automatically have an account on CoinAll. While they remain segregated accounts, it does save a user from having to go through the Know Your Customer (KYC) process more than once when onboarding onto the two separate exchanges.
Caspian’s CSP utility token listed on its first exchange, KuCoin, in February 2019 and has since been listed on a number of other exchanges. What do you look for in an exchange listing partner?
When choosing an exchange on which to list our token, it is important that our clients are comfortable trading on that exchange, and more specifically already have accounts there. The reputation of the exchange and level of transparency regarding who is managing it is also extremely important to us, as is the exchange’s track record. Another important attribute when deciding on a listing partner, is how many new investors it can introduce to CSP. We’re really looking for exchanges which can bring new users to the token, so partnering with an exchange that attracts a specific user base that we don’t yet have, for example Korean retail, will be an important future criterion.
With Caspian’s 2018 launch came the opportunity for institutional investors to gain access for the first time to a full-stack crypto trading, portfolio and risk management platform. Can you tell us about some of the firm’s key achievements to date?
Prior to Caspian’s launch, hedge funds and institutions couldn’t be sure that their crypto investments would be safeguarded, their losses hedged, that their trades could be relatively frictionless, and that enough liquidity existed. Now by using Caspian’s first-of-its-kind platform, clients can analyze all their trades in one place, regardless of which exchanges they are transacting on. It provides sophisticated connectivity and interoperability by bringing together the biggest crypto exchanges into a single interface, with greater security and zero IT overhead.
We’re proud to now be working with some of the largest and most well-respected institutional players currently in the crypto space. The names include the likes of Galaxy Digital, OSL, Kenetic Capital, Lendingblock, Seed CX and Bletchley Park Asset Management.
Caspian was the first institutional platform to offer both options and futures crypto trading as a result of our integration with Deribit, and Caspian has integrated the OKEx futures and spot products into our crypto platform as well. Our recent partnership with fiat-to-crypto exchange Binance Jersey will offer greater functionality and service to both companies’ respective client bases and aligns with our desire to be a catalyst for more institutional participation in the digital asset sector.
Our decision to release monthly trading volumes to encourage more transparency in the institutional crypto market is another key achievement that we are extremely proud of. For June, the inaugural set of figures released, Caspian’s trading volumes sat at $1.068 billion, up 85% from $578 million in April 2019. By July this figured surged over 72% to hit more than (USD) $1.845 billion.
What are Caspian’s future listing plans? Does the firm want to be on as many exchanges as possible?
We’re very focused on our partnership with CoinAll and ensuring the CoinAll community is aware of Caspian’s token. We are also focused on an eventual listing on OKEx. That said, we do intend to add to our list of exchanges, and are always actively looking for additional listing opportunities, particularly those that give us access to a range of user bases.
Finally, what is the outlook for pricing in the cryptocurrency sector over the second half of 2019?
I’m not really in the business of making predictions, but I am really enthused by the positive developments in the space. One of the most interesting movements is Bakkt’s launch of its physically delivered bitcoin futures product. Bakkt which is backed by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), will offer two products — a monthly futures contract, and daily settlement bitcoin future which will mean that investors can trade in a same-day market. We believe that this will lead to a flood of institutional money into cryptocurrencies, and that can only be a good thing for prices. Bakkt is very appealing to us at Caspian, and we’re almost certainly going to be integrating with it.
