(Bloomberg) — StoneX Group Inc. is expanding its digital-assets team and building out services in crypto trading, lending and research in a sign of renewed Wall Street interest in crypto markets.
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The broker-dealer hired five staffers from Cowen Digital after Toronto-Dominion Bank shut down Cowen Inc.’s digital-asset unit following its acquisition of the boutique investment bank last year. Eric Rose, former managing director at Cowen Digital, joined StoneX in October as head of digital-asset execution. Four other employees from Cowen Digital — Keith Coyne, David Kroger, Kyrill Firshein and Nolan Aibel — are now also working at the New York-based firm.
“My goal was to find a home for us,” Rose said in an interview. “The goals of Cowen Digital and StoneX mirror each other. We wanted to provide institutional coverage with white-glove, high-touch treatment” for clients, he said.
The $1.8 trillion crypto market is showing signs of a comeback from a bruising downturn marked by scandals and wipe-outs. Still, Wall Street banks have made limited inroads dealing with crypto tokens directly due to regulatory scrutiny and internal compliance issues. In 2022, Cowen became one of the first investment banks to offer crypto trading to institutional clients, but that effort was ended by Toronto-Dominion, which did not have the “appetite” to touch crypto, Rose said.
Read More: TD’s Cowen Closes Digital Unit That Focused on Crypto
This week, Bitcoin rose to $50,000 for the first time since December 2021, in a rally that has been driven by optimism that last month’s US approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds is leading to greater mainstream acceptance. Bitcoin was trading at about $49,039 as of 1:11 p.m. in New York.
The expansion of StoneX Digital LLC builds on a launch in 2022 led by Brian Mulcahy, who was formerly a managing director of multi-asset business development at StoneX. It currently provides trading of Bitcoin using Etana Custody as a custodian, and plans to launch non-custodial trading of Bitcoin and Ether soon, allowing clients to execute trading strategies using spot, listed derivatives and ETFs through one desk.
In the second quarter, StoneX Digital plans to launch over-the-counter trading for swaps and derivatives, which allows clients to gain exposure to crypto without use of a custody service. The firm also intends to offer crypto-lending services in the second half of the year.
“The ETF structures are certainly going to provide price appreciation or access to price, but they don’t actually provide you access to the ecosystem itself,” Rose said. “Our goal is to open up digital assets to a wider audience.”
It’s not the first time StoneX has hired former TD Cowen employees. It recently added a handful of credit staff from the firm to expand its distressed-debt sales and trading business.
Read More: StoneX Adds to Distressed-Debt Trading Team as Banks Retreat
(Updates with additional plans in seventh paragraph. A previous version of this story corrected the spelling of employee name in second paragraph.)
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