Meet Talos, an institutional trading platform for digital assets

Today, I am very excited to formally introduce Talos, an end-to-end institutional trading platform for digital assets and FX. We built Talos because we believe that digital assets have the potential to change the very fabric of financial markets, and this asset class needs and deserves a truly institutional infrastructure to leap forward.

Talos is removing the barriers to wide-scale crypto adoption by providing technology infrastructure that powers the full trade lifecycle. We’ve been live for a while, and we have an amazing team. Oh, and we’ve built a few of these before.

A bit of background

Almost exactly two years ago today, Ethan and I started Talos. Just six months prior, we each had two of the best jobs a technologist in capital markets could have. I was Head of Trading Technology for AQR, one of the top quantitative asset managers in the world, and Ethan was a lead architect with Broadway Technology, a leader in delivering institutional trading solutions. In truth starting Talos was an incredibly difficult decision for both of us — leaving a job you love is never easy, but we knew that if we stayed where we are, we’d be missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help shape the market structure for an entirely new asset class. Think about that: the emergence of a brand new asset class that could fundamentally transform our global financial markets. We knew we had to be a part of it.

Why build an institutional trading platform?

While digital assets have quickly made their mark on the retail sector, we need true institutional adoption in order for them to become a real asset class. Coming from capital markets, we saw a market structure that did not allow institutional investors to safely and efficiently participate. Difficult price discovery, lack of best-execution due to fragmented liquidity, inefficient capital allocation and a diverse set of technologies used across the board have all prevented wide-scale institutional adoption.

We’ve built Talos from the ground up to solve these problems and give institutional traders a familiar environment in which they could implement their investment strategies as well as provide the right set of services to their respective customers.

Traction and partners

In August 2019, after a year of development, we went live. Since then, we’ve worked closely with some of the biggest and most demanding players in the digital asset trading industry to help us refine our platform in real-world conditions. At the same time, we brought on board a group of world-class investors — Initialized Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Notation Capital, Autonomous Partners, Founder Collective, Coinbase Ventures and V1.VC — to help us strengthen our financial position. On top of that, we added three incredibly experienced capital markets professionals — Dave Cushing, Tim Grant and Jennifer Hill — to help us hone our go-to-market strategy.

Going “Live”

Ethan and I purposefully made the decision to keep a low profile while we built our platform and team. We knew from our experience on the client-side how frustrating it can be to get excited about a new technology solution, only to then learn the product is still years away from launch.

So today, after what has been the most exhilarating/exhausting two-year period of our respective careers, we are happy to formally introduce Talos to the world. This morning we’re announcing that our platform is live and we’re launching our brand new website, which gives background on our platform, solutions, team and company.

The team!

Without a doubt, our top achievement over the past two years has been putting together a world-class engineering team and we are extremely proud of what we’ve been able to achieve so far. You should expect to see more of us as we continue to roll out the technology that our amazing team has worked so hard on these past two years. We believe that improved infrastructure and services will dramatically expand institutional participation in the space and elevate digital assets to a level of maturity that is on par with or even beyond that of other more traditional asset classes.

We’re incredibly grateful to all who’ve helped get us to this point, and look forward to continuing to work with our employees, investors and clients in realizing our collective goals. And if you want to join a great team, building an exciting new platform, contact us at jobs@talos.com.

Our journey has just begun — stay tuned, there’s a lot more to come.

— Anton Katz | Co-Founder & CEO

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