A few weeks ago, after more than a year in stealth, Talos unveiled their new crypto trading platform, and today we’re announcing that in late 2018 we led their initial round of funding, alongside Castle Island, Arianna Simpson, and Founder Collective, and joined more recently by Initialized.
Why so stealthy? In Anton’s words: “It’s not that we were hiding, but it’s just that we come from a capital markets background and tend to shy away from talking about things before they’re ready. We’ve now reached a solid state, working with a good set of customers — The platform is maturing.”
In just the past two years, Talos has quietly built the most mature institutional trading platform for crypto, supporting the full trading lifecycle for institutions of all sizes and sophistication, including price discovery, execution, and settlement, and reinventing the way crypto assets are securely traded at scale. Anton and his co-founder Ethan have done this before in traditional markets through their work at AQR and Broadway Technology. They combine unique insight and experience with traditional capital markets and world-class engineering for high-performance trading systems.
For years now, we’ve heard the same prediction in crypto over and over again — That the “institutions” are coming, and that when they do, it will rapidly increase the mass adoption of blockchain technology. Until just recently, as Anton knows well from his time at AQR, crypto has been very difficult for traditional institutions to access — But with new trading platforms like Talos, increased clarity in the regulatory environment, and better security procedures, to name just a few — institutional adoption is finally happening. For example, just last week Square announced that they purchased $50M worth of bitcoin for their treasury. Paul Tudor Jones deemed bitcoin the “best inflation trade” and has invested single-digit percentages of their $22B hedge fund. We expect to see many similar announcements in the months and years to come, and we believe Talos will be one of the foundational enablers of this new institutional wave of crypto participants. Institutional crypto adoption is here, and we believe it’s here to stay.
