iFX EXPO Dubai: B2Broker’s Artur Azizov sees crypto as an alternate, regulated asset class

Karthik Subramanian

FinanceFeeds Editor in Chief Nikolai caught up with B2Broker’s CEO Artur Azizov during the iFX EXPO Dubai and he shared some interesting thoughts about the crypto market and its future.

Artur and B2Broker had been one of the earliest into the crypto domain and they have been building more and more tools for the same over the last 4 years. He had spoken extensively about their experience in crypto and their products in one of his earlier interviews.

Multi-Asset Platform B2Margin

The conversation started off with Nikolay querying him about their multi-asset product, B2Margin, which has crypto and futures as well. To this, Artur rightly pointed out that many of the platforms in the market aren’t actually multi-asset though they advertise so. Those providers have various instruments like FX, indexes, commodities, cryptos, etc but all of them are CFDs.

But B2Broker has the aim of being a truly multi-asset provider as they are looking to have CFDs, spot and also plan to introduce perpetual futures for crypto shortly.

Crypto Will Be Regulated But Will be Here for the Long Run

When queried about the growth and penetration of crypto, Artur had this to say, “I don’t think any broker can avoid crypto at this point of time and do good business. Crypto is everywhere and everyone is talking about it.”

When prodded further, he added a very valid point, “I don’t think crypto will become a huge part of any asset management structure. Even in the stock markets, there are blue chips that have low volatility but in the secondary market and other smaller stock markets, there is a lot of volatility that matches the volatility that you see in crypto. Crypto is just hype now but it will stabilise in 2 or 3 years. Regulation is coming and so it will become a part of any asset management structure just like stocks, FX, and commodities.”

Speaking about their products, Artur said that the B2Trader platform that they have is a pure matching engine that matches buy and sell orders. But in reality, most brokers do not need a matching engine. Their liquidity is very less and so they don’t need a pure matching engine. So B2Broker will be launching B2Margin which will not be a pure matching engine and hence the broker will not be exposed to any kind of risk.

B2BX – A Product for Institutional Clients

Then Artur talked about their other product which is named B2BX which is a spot cryptocurrency exchange designed for institutional clients. He quoted the example of Binance which he said had liquidity of only 2 or 3 BTC for the first 20 levels of market depth at most times. But B2BX will be having liquidity of around 10 BTC, for example, in the first 20 levels and this would be the major draw for institutional traders who want to clear large trades.

On B2BinPay, Artur had this to say, “It is a new version where all the blockchains like Binance Smart chain, ethereum, Tron, and other major blockchains are already integrated. Clients can add the tokens in any of these blockchains to their system by just a few API calls and by just clicking on a few buttons and they do not need to actually work with each of those blockchains. It helps the clients to do everything that they want to do and what they have in mind with blockchain.”

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