Greg Tusar, the former global head of electronic trading at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is quite thrilled about digital assets, despite the heinous year for cryptocurrencies. “It feels like being at the early days of trading equities electronically,” said Tusar, co-founder of Tagomi Holdings. “It’s early stage, there’s a lot of opportunity to build great businesses and have impact.”
Tagomi Holdings, the “first live electronic brokerage offering prime services,” began executing client trades, in which Tusar works alongside co-founders Jennifer Campbell, who is serving as chief executive officer, and Marc Bhargava, the company’s president.
According to the trio, the platform merges liquidity across several different exchanges and offers more trade reporting, as well as transparency, to customers such as hedge funds and high net-worth individuals.
Crypto investors are currently faced with many challenges, including concerns over custody, difficulties engaging with large exchanges and executing large orders, said Tusar. He also added that there isn’t anyone who can assist clients in implementing these strategies from start to finish. For example, if an investors desires to place orders of $10 million for Bitcoin, they may be limited if no exchange is able to handle the order.
“The current environment is challenging, for sure, but we think there’s a lot of longer-term demand for digital assets and helping clients understand the transformative impact of crypto and blockchain,” he said.
As prices continued to drop, volatility also fell, making the company’s suite of tools become more important, said Campbell. “In periods of lower volatility, tools like those Tagomi provides, which reduce transaction costs, will become far more important.”
Tagomi’s investors typically focus on the long-term view in regard to digital assets and cryptocurrencies. “We began building in March and began testing our platform a number of months ago,” Tusar said. “We’re launching now because we finished building the platform and want to go out and engage clients. The people we’re engaging so far are still interested and engaged because they see what this technology can do over the long-term.”
“In taking the long view, I really believe that this is a transformative technology, that we’re still in the early stages,” Tusar said.
