DRIVE Verify: Market Surveillance and a Fair Value Pricing Service for Crypto

One of the major concerns for regulators when it comes to crypto funds are related to market manipulation. Regulators like the SEC are currently seeking greater transparency and market consensus to ensure funds in the crypto market aren’t using price manipulation techniques.

While this normally happens through market indexes and price verification tools in traditional and regulated financial markets, it’s still a very undeveloped concept when it comes to crypto, creating a major obstacle for crypto ETF’s.

Lack of fair value pricing services in crypto

Services like Totem by Markit, enable institutions to independently verify derivative positions for their books and records reporting to address increasing regulatory scrutiny of balance sheets and trading activity.

This presents a legal hurdle for launching digital asset funds and ETFs. In fact, lack of consensus market prices is one of the major factors cited in the denial of crypto ETFs in the USA and has also been raised in regulatory license commentary by the SEC, IIROC and FCA.

Such a service isn’t available for digital assets, which due to single asset-multiple trading venues, requires both spot and derivative verification.

Where DRIVE Verify comes into play

DRIVE Verify provides mark-to-market prices contributed by leading crypto venues and market makers to independently check valuations for hedge funds and ETF’s. Verify is a robust and realtime API, designed to provide institutions with consensus based asset prices to support independent verification for books and records.

We’ve chosen to host the Verify API on RapidAPI, the world’s largest API marketplace and home to thousands of developers.

Which assets does DRIVE Verify cover?

Based on discussions with various funds, DRIVE Verify supports pricing against USD and USDT on the largest and most liquid of crypto assets, including:

• BTC
• ETH
• LTC
• XRP
• BSV
• BCH

DRIVE Verify is scheduled to launch, in beta, on March 11th, 2020. For more information and updates, visit driveverify.com.