Citadel Securities – the market maker owned by billionaire Ken Griffin – is reportedly building a cryptocurrency trading marketplace in a joint effort with a high-frequency trading firm, CoinDesk reported Tuesday.
Citadel Securities, a sister company to hedge fund giant Citadel, is partnering with Virtu Financial, and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Paradigm, according to an unnamed source familiar with the matter.
The work on a “cryptocurrency trading ecosystem” aims to create cleverer access to deep pools of liquidity for digital assets, the source told the online publication.
Citadel Securities had been “quietly hiring executives” to build out a crypto trading stack, a second source told CoinDesk.
Griffin told Bloomberg earlier this year he had changed his anti-cryptocurrency stance and that it was possible his firm would get into market-making for digital assets.
“Crypto has been one of the great, great stories in finance over the course of roughly the last 15 years and, I’ll be clear, I’ve been in the naysayer camp over that 15-year period,” he told Bloomberg in March.
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