Similarly to retail traders and investors, hedge funds don’t want ten logins, ten custody arrangements, and ten compliance reviews to trade crypto.
LTP, a prime broker that handled $1.2 trillion in trading volume last year, is building a single layer for institutions to interact with every part of decentralized finance (DeFi).
A prime broker sits between big trading firms and the rest of the market. They bundle financing, custody and execution into a single platform, and act as the plumbing hedge funds use in traditional equity markets. LTP is building this for crypto, and their CEO, Ethan Wang, joined TheStreet Roundtable at BVI Finance‘s Fintech on the Seas to talk about it.
One liquidity layer
One of the biggest problems crypto faces today is fragmented liquidity. It can be hard to move assets from one ecosystem to another, and today millions of dollars are siloed off from the rest of the market.
“The current situation is that the market is very fragmented. You have the liquidity at the centralized exchange, at the DeFi protocol, at theOTCdesk, or at the bank,” Wang said.
To solve this problem, LTP is building a single layer product for institutional involvement in crypto, and especially in DeFi.
“We want to build a single layer for the institutionals. Once they onboard with us, they can access the centralized exchanges, the decentralized exchanges, the OTC desks, in one layer,” Wang explained.
As institutions who manage more assets than the entire crypto market cap enter the space, this fragmented liquidity problem becomes exponentially greater. BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, reported roughly $14 trillion in AUM in 2025.
The market cap of the entire crypto market, including <a href="https://cryptoz7.com/hardware-bitcoin-wallet-bug-puts-years-of-btc-seeds-at-risk/” title=”Hardware Bitcoin Wallet Bug Puts Years of BTC Seeds at Risk”>Bitcoin, is just over $3 trillion.
