Nasdaq, Morgan Stanley Trading Vets Build Startup to Unite Crypto Market Price Ranges

Apifiny hopes to unite the disparate price bids on different crypto exchanges.

A group of trading vets from NASDAQ, Visa and Morgan Stanley say they've built a liquidity solution for the world's disparate cryptocurrency markets.

"These marketplaces are highly fragmented and remarkably inefficient," said Co-Chairman David Wield, a former vice chair of NASDAQ. "If an investor goes to one marketplace the bid that he sees in that one marketplace may be wildly different than it is in another venue."

Bid discrepancies can be a turn-off for investors used to accessing relatively stable quotes from a consolidated marketplace, Weild said.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have no such price coherence; real-time bids can vary by thousands of dollars from one market to the next.

As Weild explained it, ExOne will reach across the marketplaces to generate a consolidated quote, a "Global best bid and offer" that secures the most optimal bid for the system's users.

That's similar to the "National best bid and offer," a Wall street term referring to a broker's Security and Exchange Commission-mandated responsibility to get their clients the best possible price.

Though ExOne provides a service for crypto, Weild, who couched his explanation of ExOne and digital assets at large with the language of a Wall Street trading desk, said the platform's utility has precedence in the traditional markets.

In the U.S., the SEC's "Regulation NMS" pushed equity marketplaces to link together in a network of pooled quotes.

The idea there was to partly to modernize the country's disparate, electronic marketplaces in a single, accessible way.