BlockQuake partners with Prime Trust, Fireblocks, Chainalysis, Cyzen, Solidus, SDM, Blockfills for new crypto exchange

Rick Steves

There’s a new cryptocurrency exchange in town, it’s called BlockQuake.

Proclaimed as a regulatory-driven digital asset exchange, BlockQuake has already applied for a New York State BitLicense and has registered with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a requirement for the BitLicense and companies serving US Customers.

It will soon be pursuing SEC and CFTC registrations and licenses and is actively seeking to address compliance with FATCA, FATF, and other international regulations.

Aiming to “set the industry gold standard in global regulatory compliance and security for digital asset trading platforms”, the new challenger for the crypto industry has partnered with top providers of custody, security, and liquidity, and has built its own matching engine.

The qualified custodian partner is Prime Trust, which requires all users to go through a rigorous verification process that includes a Know Your Customer (“KYC”) verification in compliance with banking and securities laws, Anti-Money Laundering (“AML”) checks on domestic and international persons in compliance with the PATRIOT Act and Treasury regulations.

While Prime Trust provides custody of fiat deposits, Fireblocks is in charge of crypto storage with its institutional-grade Hot Vault.

Chainalysis was chosen for its real-time Know Your Transaction (“KYT”) monitoring and Solidus Labs will be on the lookout for manipulation and compliance threats, thus allowing the newborn exchange to ensure all trading is legitimate.

The platform offers app-based 2FA for logins and mandates 2FA for withdrawals. In terms of cyber risks such as security breaches, BlockQuake selected Friedman CyZen to perform automated and human safeguards such as continual security log auditing, penetration tests, cybersecurity control, processing audits, and compliance consulting.

A recent penetration test on BlockQuake’s platform showed no signs of critical vulnerabilities or cybersecurity issues ripe for exploitation.

Antonio Brasse, CEO and Co-Founder of BlockQuake, said: “As more people than ever enter the cryptocurrency space, there is an increasing demand to address issues in security and choice that many traders face.

“Using our team’s deep breadth of experience as traders in both cryptocurrency and traditional financial markets, we created a unique platform that gives anyone, from the first-time individual investor to a top-tier financial institution, a better trading experience and the ability to trade digital assets in a safe and regulated way.”

BlockQuake will provide access to various investor order types–including market, stop, limit, and time in force options, with transactions being subject to a flat trading fee of 0.2%.

The exchange has developed its own proprietary matching engine, which is claimed to handle more than 10,000,000 transactions per second while accomodating accommodate peak trading volume and reduce downtime with its scaling capabilities.

With liquidity being at ultimate deal-breaker for traders, BlockQuake partnered with Secure Digital Markets and Blockfills in order to ensure consistent and accurate market prices and a single point-of-entry, combating disjointed liquidity and discrepancies in pricing data.

At the helm of the new digital asset exchange is Antonio Brasse, who is also VP, Audit Manager (Data Governance) at Citi, and Samuel Brasse, with Kyle Driscoll, ex-J.P. Morgan and ex-Morgan Stanley, as Director of Business Development.

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