Crossover Markets
Brandon Mulvihill
March 2026
Brandon Mulvihill, co-founder and CEO of Crossover Markets, speaks to Karl Loomes about why vertically integrated exchanges constrain institutional adoption, and what must change for digital asset trading to meet institutional standards
Image: Crossover Markets
Institutional investors continue to cite market structure as a barrier to crypto adoption. What do you see as the most significant structural issues in today’s crypto trading markets?
Crypto infrastructure was built around vertically integrated exchanges optimised for growth rather than institutional risk transfer. Execution, custody, brokerage, and risk often sit inside the same entity, concentrating operational exposure and fragmenting liquidity into isolated ecosystems. Institutions expect interoperable infrastructure where execution venues compete on performance, not balance sheet capture. The absence of that separation limits fungibility and prevents liquidity from scaling efficiently. CROSSx was built to mirror inter-dealer market structure by operating as execution-only infrastructure, allowing institutions to access liquidity without inheriting exchange counterparty risk.
Market manipulation and uneven execution quality are persistent concerns. Why do these problems remain so hard to solve in crypto compared with traditional markets?
Many crypto venues lack standardised performance benchmarks. Without deterministic infrastructure, it becomes difficult to measure execution quality objectively. Fragmented liquidity and vertically integrated models obscure accountability and amplify variability during volatility. Institutions require environments engineered for predictable behavior — not just fast matching, but consistent performance under stress. CROSSx was designed with microsecond execution, high-throughput message handling, and deterministic routing so participants can evaluate execution outcomes quantitatively rather than anecdotally.
The central limit order book is still the dominant trading model in digital assets. Where does this model fall short for institutional participants?
A traditional central limit order book does not isolate liquidity providers from clients. Rather, it places all participants into a single shared pool of liquidity.
When a client enters that pool with an aggressive trading strategy, it can adversely impact pricing and liquidity for everyone. Some central limit order book (CLOB) venues attempt to mitigate this structural weakness by introducing ‘private rooms’ to separate retail and hedge fund flows. However, these solutions remain limited in scalability because participants still share liquidity provisioning.
By contrast, an electronic communication network (ECN) execution is built on speed, performance, and scalability.
Each taker receives individualised market data and their own liquidity pool. If one participant interacts with liquidity in a way that is abusive or inefficient, it does not have an adverse impact on the pricing or execution quality experienced by others. At Crossover, we describe this model as optimised matchmaking — aligning maker and taker expectations so liquidity can be priced appropriately.
Crossover Markets takes an execution-only ECN approach. What advantages does this model offer institutions compared with vertically integrated crypto exchanges?
Execution-only architecture eliminates structural conflicts. CROSSx does not custody assets or take principal risk, aligning it with established inter-dealer market norms. Institutions can integrate their preferred prime brokerage and custody arrangements while accessing a neutral venue optimised solely for performance. This separation improves price discovery, reduces counterparty concentration, and encourages liquidity providers to compete on execution quality rather than captive flow.
More specifically, the execution only model allows the client to buy BTC/USD on CROSSx and sell it anywhere else to close their position (or vice versa).
Because CROSSx does not hold the client captive CROSSx has to have the best price and liquidity at the precise moment in time the client is trading otherwise CROSSx will not win trades. To accomplish this, speed and performance are critical.
Fungibility across venues is a core feature of CROSSx. Why is this so important for institutional trading, and how does its absence affect liquidity today?
For the industry to mature, trading volumes must grow by an order of magnitude, which ultimately requires trading fees to compress. The dominant fees are cost of capital and execution fees.
Fungibility materially reduces the cost of capital because an institutional client can trade across multiple platforms and liquidity sources while net settling with a single prime broker.
This model is significantly more efficient than prefunding multiple exchanges, where a client might end up long BTC/USD at one venue and short BTC/USD at another and must operationally flatten those positions. In a prime brokerage framework, those exposures offset at the prime broker, where the client’s collateral is held.
Just as importantly, a fungible business model allows clients to freely choose where to access liquidity at any moment, creating real competition between marketplaces.
That competition compresses execution fees and forces marketplaces, including CROSSx, to deliver tighter spreads and better execution quality. Without fungibility, liquidity remains siloed and expensive.
The result is that fungibility has a cascading effect that materially lowers the total cost to trade.
CROSSx 2.0 places a strong emphasis on speed, transparency, and execution quality. From an institutional perspective, which of these factors matters most and why?
Execution quality is the ultimate metric because it reflects both speed and transparency. Institutions evaluate venues based on fill consistency, market impact, and system behavior during volatility.
CROSSx 2.0’s architecture prioritises deterministic execution — microsecond latency, high throughput, and resilient routing — so performance remains stable regardless of market conditions. Institutions value predictability over peak speed because it enables scalable risk transfer.
Regulatory uncertainty remains a defining feature of crypto markets. How much can better market structure mitigate risk while regulation continues to evolve?
Timely question. The 10 October 2025 market dislocation highlighted a structural weakness in crypto markets.
Many exchanges combine credit and execution within the same venue. When those platforms experienced outages, institutional clients were temporarily unable to manage their risk.
This is a clear example of how current market structure can fail under stress and helps explain why institutions are increasingly moving toward OTC environments with fungibility, such as Ripple Prime.
Regulatory certainty, which is expected to advance this year in the United States, will unlock an entirely new wave of demand from Wall Street’s largest players.
That level of demand is what drives the supply chain, and these institutions will not accept the historical market structure of vertically integrated models.
Looking ahead, what changes do you believe are still required for crypto trading infrastructure to fully meet institutional expectations?
Bank custody. In order for the largest institutions in the world to enter crypto at scale, they need the same banks that custody their assets today to offer crypto custody as well.
The custody conversation is just as important as regulation, as both are required to drive meaningful shifts in who is participating in the market and, ultimately, how they trade.
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