As institutional participation in digital assets grows, the way firms trade is starting to change. Execution quality, access to liquidity and the separation of credit and execution are becoming increasingly important. Brandon Mulvihill, Co-Founder and CEO of Crossover Markets, spoke with Traders Magazine about what institutions should look for in a trading venue, the rise of prime brokerage and how he expects the crypto market structure to evolve.

Fee-inclusive execution costs are only one measure of venue quality. What other factors should institutional firms prioritize when evaluating where to trade digital assets?

True institutional buy-side clients are extremely focused on total cost to trade, which includes execution cost as well as cost of capital. The use of prime brokers is increasingly becoming the headline story, notably as bank-side custody comes online. The ability to trade across multiple liquidity points and net settle in one location brings enormous capital savings. At Crossover, we don’t believe any institution should bind themselves to a vertically integrated model that mandates credit and execution are married together. CROSSx wins trades based solely on the merit of our pricing and execution quality, without ever holding clients captive.

Many crypto exchanges combine custody, execution, market making, and listing services under one roof. What structural conflicts can that create for institutional participants?

The vertically integrated model combines all clients into one liquidity pool, mixing institutions and retail, liquidity providers and liquidity takers. As a result, liquidity providers can price retail and also take liquidity in competition against them. These models also hold clients captive, introducing unnecessary risk. On October 10, 2025, we watched a dislocation event where several crypto exchanges went down and liquidated clients at prices the exchanges themselves determined unilaterally. Because those venues marry credit and execution, institutions couldn’t manage risk as they would in other asset classes. That event accelerated a migration to the OTC model — separating credit, clearing, and execution — more analogous to the global foreign exchange model.

How do fairness, transparency, and low latency translate into measurable improvements in execution quality for buy-side firms?

Nearly all 110+ institutions trading on CROSSx are sponsored by a prime broker such as Ripple Prime or BitGo Prime. This model allows clients to buy BTC/USD on CROSSx and sell elsewhere, or vice versa, with no obligation to trade on our platform. Every trade CROSSx wins is based solely on pricing and execution quality — currently around 1.5 to 2 million trades per month. CROSSx matches trades in single-digit microseconds, meaning makers can see hundreds of price updates in the time a crypto exchange updates once. We also utilize a proprietary Smart Order Matching execution model, delivering Best Bid Offer based on price, size, and time, while re-ranking liquidity providers in real time based on fill ratios, response times, and market impact. Slow response times carry an economic cost on CROSSx that most exchanges don’t reflect.

As institutional participation in digital assets grows, do you expect market structure to evolve toward more specialized service providers rather than vertically integrated exchanges?

As regulatory clarity becomes tangible and bank-side custody grows, we will see the maturation of prime brokerage put enormous pressure on execution venues to win market share on the merit of their performance rather than by holding clients captive. Costs will compress significantly — Wall Street-level institutions mandate the lowest cost to trade, and we anticipate trading costs in digital assets will fall by an order of magnitude as volumes skyrocket. Crossover is uniquely positioned for this environment. Because we don’t hold client money and are never counterparty to trades, our operational costs are low and relatively fixed. CROSSx can do 10x or 20x current volumes without material budget increases — unlike crypto exchanges that need to generate hundreds of dollars per million to run institutional business lines.

What changes would you like to see in the way firms measure and report best execution, particularly as regulators place greater emphasis on execution quality?

It is important to first highlight that institutional demand is already forcing improvements to best execution. As suggested previously, if an institution has a prime broker, then by definition the execution venue had better perform, otherwise that institution has zero obligation to ever trade on a particular platform. Decoupling credit from execution is the healthiest move the market can make when discussing best execution. 

Looking ahead, what characteristics will distinguish the venues that attract long-term institutional liquidity from those that struggle to compete?

Scale. Simply put the supply chain, notably with respect to an execution venue, must demonstrate that its platform can scale with respect to sales, liquidity analytics and management, throughput, and trade executions without placing burdens on operational costs. Brokers, or crypto exchanges, as we call them in digital assets, are coming under serious pressure. Because these institutions hold client money and contain credit risk, the cost to run these business lines is only going to grow as regulations come to fruition globally. Our belief is that the majority of crypto exchanges will either retreat in their global ambitions or they will retreat from the institutional world and focus on their core competency of retail trading. Offering a platform that is run from the cloud and delivered via a mobile app or WebSocket API is a retail offering and not something that was ever going to truly compete for Wall Street level institutional flows. 

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