B2C2 founder Max Boonen, the CEO of B2C2 Japan Phil Gillespie, and Zane Tackett, B2C2’s Head of OTC Sales have participated in a webinar organized by Coindesk, and they’ve shed some light on OTC marketplace for cryptocurrency avenues.

Their wide-ranging conversation—the first in a new series from Coindesk—analyzed the present state of cryptocurrency markets and offered a glimpse into their future. “More and more players are coming in because we’ve hit that critical mass,” Gillespie said. This growth in transforming the market has been faster than many exchanges can handle. Some exchanges have experienced technical glitches, while others have had to turn off new-user registrations.

“The exchanges have definitely been stressed,” Gillespie said. “More and more people are starting to go to the lower-risk and higher-service model of dealing with OTC desks.”

On the back of NASDAQ-powered cryptocurrency exchange platform (in the name of DX.Exchange) is all set to launch in June 2018. DX becomes the latest in a slew of crypto exchange services as the digital currency market continues to mature. The platform hopes to offer a robust ecosystem for OTC derivatives and crypto tokens.

OTC desks, like B2C2’s, offer clients services like round-the-clock liquidity, short selling, and post-trade settlement. “People who are more accustomed to interacting with traditional financial markets can easily connect to our OTC platform and trade,” Tackett said. “B2C2 only started getting involved in OTC at the beginning of the year, and the growth in volume we’ve seen has been staggering.”

Better infrastructure is making cryptocurrency markets more attractive to financial institutions that previously avoided them, due to excessive risk. “The direction is toward the major asset managers, the banks,” Boonen said. “Banks have been around a long time,” Boonen said, “and the fact they’ve been around so long suggests to me that banks have some function to play.”

Regulation can also play a positive role. “We are running into the reasons why a lot of regulations exist,” Tackett said. Japan’s 16 government-registered cryptocurrency exchanges recently established a self-regulatory body after hackers stole $530 million from Coincheck in January—a move that both Boonen and Gillespie praised.

While questions remain about how cryptocurrency markets will develop, to veterans of the financial industry, the crypto landscape is not as unfamiliar as it sometimes seems. “It’s kind of like the rebirth of what everyone went through 20 or 30 years ago in electronic FX trading,” Gillespie said. “At the end of the day, when it comes down to the real trading, the concepts are all the same.”

Cryptocurrency exchange platforms are often targets of cybercriminals. The team at DX plans to leverage the robust security features of the NASDAQ architecture to guard against malicious incursions from hackers.

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