The Journey to $1 Trillion

This week, Talos crossed $1 trillion in notional trading volume through our platform since inception.

The milestone matters because of what it represents: years of trust from our clients, institutions increasingly relying on Talos for mission-critical trading activity, and a market that has moved from early experimentation toward broad institutional adoption.

We spend a lot of time, internally and with clients and partners, talking about where digital assets are going and what infrastructure the next generation of markets will require. This milestone is a good opportunity to share some of that thinking publicly: where Talos started, what we have built, and where we believe the market is headed.

When Ethan Feldman and I started Talos in 2018, we came from traditional capital markets, where we had spent much of our careers building trading systems for large financial institutions. We understood what institutional market infrastructure needed to look like: reliable, performant, connected and able to operate under real pressure.

At the time, we were increasingly interested in crypto and the blockchain technology behind it. Our original idea was actually to start an investment business. As we looked more closely at what it would take to operate one, however, the infrastructure gap became obvious.

We believed crypto was going to become an asset class and that institutions would eventually need to trade it with the same reliability, execution quality, risk management and operational controls they expected in other markets. That infrastructure did not exist, so we decided to build it.

Phase 1: Build the best trading platform for crypto

Our first aspiration for Talos was focused on trading.

Crypto liquidity was highly fragmented across exchanges, OTC desks and market makers. Connectivity was inconsistent and the market operated 24/7. Institutions needed aggregated liquidity, smart order routing, algorithmic execution, credit and settlement workflows, and infrastructure that could operate globally and continuously.

In other words, they needed the institutional trading stack they already relied on in traditional markets, adapted for the realities of digital assets.

Our first trade went through the platform in 2019. We crossed $1 billion in cumulative volume in 2020 and $10 billion less than six months later.

As the market matured, our clientele expanded. We began working with asset managers, hedge funds, banks, brokers, liquidity providers and other financial institutions around the world. Increasingly, they were approaching digital assets as part of a broader investment business, with the corresponding requirements around execution, compliance, risk, settlement, reporting and operations.

That led naturally to the next phase of Talos.

Phase 2: Support the full investment lifecycle

Trading remains at the core of what we do, but institutions need much more than execution. They need to construct and rebalance portfolios, manage liquidity and risk, measure execution quality, reconcile activity, coordinate with custodians, settle trades, manage treasury and report across their organizations.

Talos today supports the institutional digital asset lifecycle from pre-trade portfolio construction through execution and post-trade settlement. The addition of Coin Metrics extends that foundation with institutional market data, indexes and on-chain intelligence.

From the earliest days of Talos, we believed data would eventually become a central part of the platform, although we did not know exactly when or how. Today, that is much clearer.

As assets move on-chain and markets become more global, distributed and continuous, the data institutions rely on will also need to evolve. Investors and service providers will increasingly need high-quality market, reference, index, risk and on-chain data that works across traditional and digital asset workflows. Our acquisition of Coin Metrics gives us a strong foundation for that evolution and for continued investment in the next generation of institutional data.

The roadmap has therefore been fairly consistent: start with trading, expand across the investment lifecycle, and build the operating infrastructure institutions need as more financial activity moves onto digital rails.

Phase 3: Build the infrastructure for all assets becoming digital

The next phase of Talos is about applying the infrastructure we have built for crypto to a much broader transformation in capital markets.

We have always believed that, over time, all assets will become digital assets. That does not mean every asset class moves at the same pace or that traditional infrastructure disappears. It means more financial instruments will be represented, traded, financed, margined and settled on blockchain rails, and institutions will need infrastructure that lets them operate seamlessly across both traditional and on-chain markets.

Crypto was the first large-scale use case and forced the market to solve many of these infrastructure problems early: fragmented liquidity, 24/7 trading, global settlement, custody coordination, on-chain transparency, operational risk and institutional controls. Those challenges are increasingly relevant well beyond crypto.

Stablecoins are one important example. If assets can move almost instantaneously, the cash leg of a transaction needs to move with similar speed, availability and programmability. The same infrastructure will matter for emerging use cases such as AI-driven payments, where transactions may happen programmatically and at very high volume. We believe stablecoins will play a meaningful role in both areas, which is why Talos continues to invest in the infrastructure around them.

At the same time, tokenized funds, Treasuries, equities and other traditional instruments are moving on-chain, while new market structures are emerging.

Perpetuals, which developed largely in crypto, are expanding into equities, commodities, indexes and other exposures. Prediction markets are giving investors a more direct way to express views on policy decisions, economic releases, elections and other measurable outcomes that historically might have been expressed indirectly through traditional instruments.

These products look different, but the infrastructure trend is similar. Markets are becoming more global, continuous and programmable, creating greater demand for always-on liquidity, collateral, settlement, data and risk infrastructure.

Bridging the market that exists with the market that is coming

This transition will take time, and institutions will operate across traditional and digital infrastructure for many years.

That creates a difficult problem. Institutions cannot afford fragmented access, disconnected risk or completely separate operating models for every asset class and market structure. They need liquidity, execution, risk, compliance, settlement, data and reporting to work across both legacy and on-chain rails.

This is where Talos is positioned.

We built the platform to connect fragmented liquidity, support institutional execution, coordinate post-trade workflows and operate around the clock. Those capabilities were first applied to crypto, but the underlying infrastructure problem is much broader. As more assets move on-chain, institutions will increasingly need a layer connecting the systems they use today with the infrastructure they will use tomorrow.

We are also expanding the ways our clients can provide access to their own customers. Banks, brokers, platforms and other service providers want to offer a broader set of digital and tokenized instruments without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure themselves. Our white label and service provider offerings allow them to embed Talos connectivity, liquidity, execution, data and post-trade capabilities into their own products.

The market is converging from both directions. Traditional institutions want access to crypto, stablecoins, tokenized assets, prediction markets and perpetuals. Crypto-native institutions increasingly want access to traditional exposures. Service providers want to offer more products through a common institutional infrastructure.

We are already seeing this hybrid model take shape. Talos supports crypto ETFs in the US and tokenized equities where eligible outside the US, and we are advancing work around tokenized collateral with Nasdaq and tokenized securities settlement with DTCC.

The more important point is what happens as additional asset classes move onto digital rails. Digital assets are no longer synonymous with crypto. As equities, funds and other instruments acquire a common digital representation, institutions should be able to operate across them using common workflows rather than building separate infrastructure each time another asset class moves on-chain.

Capital markets are becoming more digital, global, programmable and continuous. Over time, we believe the distinction between traditional and digital markets will matter less and less.

The next trillion

Crossing $1 trillion represents the trust of our clients and partners over the past eight years, the institutions that took a chance on us early, the ecosystem partners that helped build this market, and the phenomenal Talos team that built the technology behind every one of those trades.

We are still early. The next phase is not simply about more crypto trading volume. It is about building the institutional infrastructure for a financial system where assets, collateral, liquidity, cash, data and risk can move across traditional and digital rails with fewer seams.

The first trillion validated the foundation. We are now building for the next one.

‍

^{Disclaimer: Talos offers software-as-a-service products that provide connectivity tools for institutional clients. Talos does not provide clients with any pre-negotiated arrangements with liquidity providers or other parties. Clients are required to independently negotiate arrangements with liquidity providers and other parties bilaterally. Talos is not party to any of these arrangements. Services and venues may not be available in all jurisdictions.} 

‍