It has become a trend for liquidity providers to play the role of investment institutions at the same time. Recently, the frequent investment of DWF Labs, a market maker, has attracted attention. Prior to this, trading institutions such as Jump, Wintermute, GSR, and Alameda also actively participated in project investment and incubation. Flow Traders, another low-key traditional trading institution, also frequently appears in the list of project investment institutions.
Flow Traders is a global digital liquidity provider focusing on exchange-traded products ETP. It was established in the Netherlands in 2004 and is one of the largest ETF trading companies in the European Union. It mainly provides trading services in stocks and derivatives, currencies, and bonds , and also created exchange transaction certificates based on Bitcoin and Ethereum to carry out cryptocurrency ETN trading business. It has offices in the Netherlands, Singapore, the United States, Hong Kong, and Romania. It obtained Chinas Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) license last year and was approved to open a representative office in Shanghai.
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Dutch trading company
In the Age of Discovery, the worlds earliest stock exchange market was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and modern finance sprouted here, so the financial market in the Netherlands is relatively developed.
More than 20 years ago, stock traders Jan van Kuijk and Roger Hodenius worked together at the Amsterdam trading company Optiver. Roger Hodenius reputation for an excellent trading record led him to strike out on his own and teamed up with like-minded Jan van Kuijk to found Flow Traders in 2004, which was later listed on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange in 2015. The two founders who were born in trading are very low-key and rarely appear in the newspapers. After the company’s listing, they have already partly cashed out and withdrawn from the company’s specific affairs. They are currently serving as non-executive directors, but they still hold more than 20% of the shares of Flow Traders. major shareholder.
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Dennis Dijkstra on the left; Mike Kuehnel on the right
Current CEO Mike Kuehnel joined Flow Traders in August 2021 and was confirmed as a member of the Management Board and Chief Financial Officer the following month. Mike has over 20 years of investment banking and strategic consulting experience. Prior to joining Flow Traders, Mike was a partner at Bain Company where he led the investment banking and financial market infrastructure practice in EMEA. Prior to that, he was at Goldman Sachs where he advised on large equity and MA transactions in European banking, insurance, asset management, private wealth and exchanges.
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Established venture capital arm FlowTradersCapital to explore digital asset opportunities
Last July, Flow Traders announced the establishment of a dedicated venture capital arm, FlowTradersCapital, with an initial commitment of €50 million. With a focus on platforms, data and connectivity, it invests directly in innovative companies that have the potential to accelerate growth, improve financial market transparency and enable financial ecosystem scalability. In fact, before the department was formally established, FlowTraders had provided support in the early stages of several crypto start-up projects, and obtained relatively rich returns in investments such as crypto exchange ErisX. In addition to the potential to generate return on investment, Flow Traders will use it to expand its participation in emerging technologies, identify market trends and explore new business opportunities that create long-term strategic value.
In the eyes of Dennis Dijkstra, Flow Traders CEO at the time, creating Flow Traders Capital was the logical and logical next step for Flow Traders. Investing in Flow Traders financial capital, knowledge and expertise provides access to emerging ecosystems, innovative technologies and synergies with existing businesses.
In addition to direct financial support, Flow Traders digital asset division can also provide market-making advice for token projects and cryptocurrency exchanges, leveraging its decades of market-making experience in traditional markets. It provides stable, deep and competitive liquidity around the clock through the complex trading algorithms of more than 20 top cryptocurrency exchanges, and is able to provide partners with tailored liquidity solutions. Additionally, the Flow Traders Capital team can provide founders with knowledge of product design, capital markets and go-to-market strategies.
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Portfolio is dominated by DeFi
Flow Traders has been actively investing in crypto projects since last year, and as of February of this year, the company said it had invested 25.3 million euros in 23 investments in the crypto industry. The encryption targets invested by Flow Traders, which has been immersed in the financial trading market for nearly 20 years, are basically DeFi and infrastructure.
The following is PANews partial crypto portfolio inventory based on public information.
Sei Network
Sei Labs was founded by Jeff Feng, a former technology investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and Jay Jog, a former software engineer at Robinhood. The public chain project Sei Network developed by it is the first Layer 1 blockchain designed for transactions. It is still in the public test network stage , plans to launch the mainnet later this year. Last August, Sei LabsCompleted a $5 million seed round of financing, Multicoin Capital led the investment, Flow Traders participated in the investment; September, Sei NetworkLaunched $50 million eco-fund; In January this year, the cryptocurrency exchange MEXC launched a special fund of 20 million US dollars to support the development of key projects of Sei Network; in April this year, Sei Labs announced a valuation of 800 million US dollarsCompleted $30 million in financing, will be used for development and marketing in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to Flow Traders, investors include Jump Capital, Multicoin Capital, etc.
C 3
Crypto Exchange C 3 is a self-custodial exchange that aims to change the market structure of cryptocurrencies and provide a safe, transparent and trustless trading platform. One of the main advantages of C 3s self-hosting design is the versatility it offers users. Individuals can seamlessly transact from a variety of non-custodial wallets spanning multiple blockchains, while institutions can transact through their preferred custodian. In February of this year,C 3 Announces $6M Seed Funding, the venture capital arm of hedge fund Two Sigma Investments led the investment, with participation from Flow Traders and Jump Capital.
Empiric Network
Empiric Network, a decentralized oracle machine, built on StarkNet, is an oracle machine using zero-knowledge technology that introduces the principles of DeFi into data infrastructure. In July last year, Empiric Network announced the completion of $7 million in financing. This round of financing was led by Variant, Flow Traders participated in the investment, and angel investors included Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and others. The financing funds will be mainly used to recruit and expand the development team.
Thalex
Thalex, a crypto derivatives trading platform focused on options and futures, has partnered with Bitfinex and Bitstamp to enable their clients to access the full suite of Thalex derivatives products from the user interface. Positions on Thalex can be opened via instant free transfers of collateral held on partner exchanges to dedicated Thalex margin accounts. The Bitfinex partnership is expected to be operational later this year. In July last year, Thalex announced that it had completed a round A financing of 7.5 million euros, with participation from Bitfinex, Bitstamp and Flow Traders.
Elwood Technologies
The encryption technology company Elwood Technologies is owned by the well-known hedge fund manager Alan Howard. Founded in 2018, it is a market access and trading platform focused on cryptocurrencies, providing services for financial technology companies, asset management companies and other institutional investors. It entered into a strategic integration with Bloomberg last February, serving institutional clients of Bloomberg Assets and Investment Manager AIM. In May last year, Elwood Technologies completed a US$70 million Series A financing, led by Goldman Sachs and Dawn Capital, and participated by Flow Traders.
Tonic
Tonic is the NEAR ecological DEX protocol, established in January 2022, and its decentralized collaboration is used to quickly and seamlessly trade any asset on NEAR and Aurora. In April last year, Tonic announced the completion of $5 million in financing, led by Electric Capital and MOVE Capital, and participated by Flow Traders. This round of financing will be used to expand the team and scale.
BloXroute
BloXroute is a service provider of a blockchain distribution network for DeFi traders on Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chains. Its high-performance Blockchain Distributed Network (BDN) allows its users to avoid network congestion and reliably receive important information about buying and selling orders, prices, and positions. BloXroute announced in April last year that it had completed a US$70 million Series B round of financing. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 under SoftBank led the investment, Flow Traders participated in the investment, and SoftBank Group Investment Director Robert Kaplan subsequently joined the BloXroute board of directors.
Ondo Finance
DeFi lending protocol Ondo Finance was founded by ex-Goldman Sachs Nathan Allman and Pinku Surana. Its treasury includes two types of fixed income and variable income. The fixed income treasury seeks stable income, and the variable income treasury maximizes income through leverage. In August 2021, Ondo announced the completion of a $4 million seed round of financing, led by Pantera Capital.
AllianceDAO
The predecessor of Alliance DAO is the Web3 incubator DeFi Alliance (DeFi Alliance). In January 2022, DeFi Alliance created Alliance DAO, a decentralized organization, and completed a financing of 50 million US dollars. More than 300 contributors joined DAO and participated in financing. As a result, Alliance DAO began to replace DeFiAlliance and entered the public eye. It is the largest in the WEB3 field. Accelerate one of the DAOs.
Kemet Trading
Kemet Trading is a simplified solution for digital asset derivatives trading designed for institutional investors, aiming to provide institutional-grade infrastructure for digital asset derivatives trading, optimizing access to liquidity, data, trade execution and post-trade workflow. Provides services such as access to the best liquidity venues through CeFi and DeFi.
Astaria
NFT lending platform and liquidity engine that allows users to stake their NFTs as collateral to earn instant liquidity, a cryptocurrency veteran who previously led decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Sushi and worked at ConsenSys, Astaria will eventually integrate Multiple chains other than Ethereum to support lending in other cryptocurrencies. $8 million in seed funding, with participation from Wintermute and Flow Traders, among others.
D 2 X
Headquartered in Amsterdam, D 2 X aims to build a pioneering institutional-grade and regulated options and futures exchange for digital assets in Europe, providing financial institutions with capital-efficient and clean exposure to the asset class while reducing operations and regulation risk. D 2 X takes a regulatory-first approach, aligned with the existing EU regulatory framework. It closed a €5 million seed round in early 2022, led by Tioga Capital Partners.
Crossover Markets
Digital asset trading firm Crossover Markets is launching a new trading venue, CrossX, to meet the liquidity requirements of institutions participating in the crypto market. CrossX will enable clients to create custom dark and light colored liquidity pools. It will also support anonymous, public and semi-public transactions. The transaction fee on the platform is 0.01%. In March of this year, Crossover Markets completed a $6.35 million seed round of financing, with participation from Flow Traders and Wintermute.
GoGoPool
The decentralized staking protocol GoGoPool is based on the L1 blockchain Avalanche and aims to bring liquidity to staking and simplify the process of launching subnets on the Avalanche blockchain. In August last year, GoGoPool completed a $5 million seed round of financing, co-led by Framework Ventures and Coinfund, with participation from Flow Traders and others.
Injective
Injective, a public chain optimized for DeFi, announced in January this year the launch of a $150 million ecosystem plan to further facilitate developers to build new applications on its chain. Others have also joined the initiative, including Pantera Capital, Kucoin Ventures, Jump Crypto, IDG Capital, Gate Labs, Delphi Labs, Flow Traders, and Kraken Ventures. The Injective Ecological Fund is currently one of the largest funds in the Cosmos community.
Econia Labs
Econia Labs is the startup that developed the order book protocol for the Aptos blockchain and has partnered with the Aptos team to develop the protocol. In March, it raised $6.5 million in a seed round led by Dragonfly, which included Aptos Labs, Wintermute Ventures, and Flow Traders among its other backers. The company will use the funds to expand its team, support community initiatives such as hackathons and grant programs, and help developers join the Aptos and Econia ecosystems.
