Banks Are Adding Crypto Trading to Their Resumes
Crypto was supposed to put an end to traditional financial systems, yet here we are.
TOLGA AKMENThis post originally appeared in Money Stuff.
The job of a bank's trading desks is to help their clients trade the financial stuff that they want to trade. There's no especially coherent conceptual definition of what counts as "financial stuff." Part of the definition is regulatory -- if regulators say that banks can't own physical commodities or Venezuelan bonds, then banks will have trouble facilitating trading in those things, and they'll essentially fall out of the "financial" system -- but mostly it is loose and conventional. If the sorts of customers who are banks' customers want to trade a thing, then that thing becomes a financial thing, and so the banks had better start helping them trade it.