Crypto Trader Cumberland Upgrades from Skype to Wall Street Interface

Cryptocurrency market maker Cumberland is modernizing the way it handles over-the-counter trades with counterparties.

Announced Tuesday, the unit of financial trading giant DRW has unveiled a so-called single-dealer platform called Marea, allowing institutional investors to interact with Cumberland through a screen-based interface, rather than negotiating trades by phone or Skype.

The new portal brings Cumberland in line with the way OTC trading has been conducted on Wall Street for more than a decade in traditional asset classes like stocks.

To start, the new OTC platform will handle trading of 10 popular cryptocurrencies and also interacts with back-office reporting, ably handled via a tie-up with trade reporting specialists MG Stover.

The initial 10 market pairs include zcash, stellar lumens and the U.S. dollar-linked stablecoin TrueUSD, and then the plan is to offer the other coins Cumberland trades, said Cho.

"We are hoping to expand that into all the coins that we trade here, so upwards of about 40 coins, and then expand across the different settlement fiat currencies we also settle in - dollars, Swiss francs, euros, GBP and other currencies like that," he said.

"So it's a little bit different from exchanges where you are set to what the exchange offers you from just an order book perspective. In. the future, we hope this opens up our counterparties to trade any asset that we allow against either any fiat currency or any other crypto that we offer."

Also to be added to the portal is the research Cumberland began producing in-house last year, Cho said.

Marea integrates with back-office trade reporting and reconciliation of positions at the end of the day, said Cho, "Whether that's through a spreadsheet that's downloadable or through the user interface."

Matt Stover, CEO of MG Stover, said this involves simple concepts like getting a trade confirmation that is time-stamped with the right quantity and making sure funds have proper books and record.