CoinRoutes was founded in 2017 with one clear objective: build institutional grade infrastructure for digital asset trading. Liquidity was fragmented, venue standards were inconsistent, and serious firms were forced to rely on basic exchange tools or expensive internal builds. There was a structural gap between how institutions wanted to trade and what the market could provide.

I joined CoinRoutes in 2022 during a period of extreme volatility. Within months, Terra Luna collapsed in May 2022, followed by the failure of FTX in November 2022. The market entered a prolonged bear cycle that tested liquidity, counterparty trust, capital discipline, and operational resilience.

Early in my tenure, I worked directly with clients navigating these dislocations in real time. Conversations focused on venue exposure, capital preservation, execution integrity, and strategy adaptation in a contracting environment. As I progressed into my current role leading global partnerships and business development, those early experiences shaped how I view institutional infrastructure.

Volatility requires agile strategies and resilient infrastructure.

That principle has guided CoinRoutes since inception.

Execution

We began with execution because it was the industry’s most immediate structural weakness. Institutions trading meaningful size required intelligent cross venue routing, adaptive maker and taker logic, and measurable slippage reduction. At scale, basis points directly impact returns.

Our algorithms were built for crypto’s microstructure. Markets trade continuously, liquidity fragments quickly and venue quality varies. We designed execution around dynamic liquidity interaction, participation control, and embedded Trade Cost Analysis that actually quantifies performance.

Execution is not only about speed, it requires consistency, measurement, and alpha preservation in both expansionary and contractionary cycles.

Portfolio and Risk

As volatility intensified, visibility and control became as critical as execution quality. This drove our expansion beyond execution.

Following our acquisition of QIS in London, we began building CLARITY, an integrated portfolio management and risk environment within CoinRoutes. CLARITY delivers real time positions, profit and loss tracking, exposure monitoring, and enforceable risk parameters alongside execution.

As our CEO Ian Weisberger explains, “Our clients should not have to stitch together multiple systems to trade institutional size. The acquisition of QIS accelerates our ability to become a true one stop shop where execution, portfolio visibility, and risk controls operate seamlessly in one environment.”

Integration is not about convenience. It is about structural resilience. Decision makers require a unified view of capital, exposure, and execution performance.

Accountability

As digital asset firms institutionalize, governance standards rise. Our CEO Ian Weisberger often notes, “The lines between digital assets, FX, and commodities are disappearing.” That convergence unlocks cross asset strategies, from gold and BTC spreads to seamless portfolio execution across the institutional investable universe. As Ian says, “The future is not TradFi or crypto. It is both traded together.”

As markets converge, performance measurement must mature with them.

Client Strategy Diversity

Throughout my years at CoinRoutes, direct client engagement has remained constant. We work with firms trading tens of millions to billions per month, including proprietary trading firms, market makers, asset managers, brokerages, exchanges, and high net worth traders operating at institutional scale.

They do not all trade the same way, and they should not.

Within proprietary trading alone, strategies span systematic models, market neutral arbitrage, directional long short mandates, volatility strategies, basis trading, and liquidity provision. Market makers prioritize spread capture and inventory management. Asset managers focus on capital allocation discipline and exposure control.

As one of our co-founders, Michael Holstein, often emphasizes, “Infrastructure should enable strategy, not constrain it. The moment technology limits how a client wants to trade, it stops being institutional grade.”

What our clients share is a need for flexibility without fragmentation.

Responding to Institutional Demand

Options are becoming a core component of institutional portfolio construction in digital assets.

In the coming quarter, we will expand our integration with Deribit by introducing a dedicated options trade ticket, sweep functionality, and direct market access execution. This buildout delivers the same level of execution control in options that institutions expect in spot and derivatives markets, enabling more intelligent liquidity interaction and greater precision at scale within the CoinRoutes workflow.

This is the first phase of a broader options strategy. After strengthening our Deribit integration, we will evaluate additional liquidity providers to ensure the same cross venue flexibility that defines our execution infrastructure today.

This evolution is client driven. Having joined during one of the most turbulent periods in digital asset history and grown alongside our clients through multiple cycles, one conclusion is clear: 

institutional confidence is built on infrastructure, not optimism.

That continues to guide how we build.