While most people use classic cryptocurrency exchanges to buy and sell crypto assets, institutional investors operating large sums prefer to trade a digital asset on an over-the-counter (OTC) market. This is because existing crypto exchanges cannot offer institutional investors a secure infrastructure and a proper level of liquidity.

Circle Trade’s Head of trading, Dan Matuszewski, told Cointelegraph: “The crypto winter is forcing companies to look for new opportunities and they’re now realizing what we’ve known for years: OTC trading desks already play an integral role in crypto”.

Thus, large investors are increasingly buying cryptocurrency in huge quantities. This poses a problem of cryptocurrency market liquidity. Due to the large reserves of big players whose assets are valued at several million dollars, a one-time trade of a large number of crypto can bring down the rate of an ordinary exchange. This problem results in great demand and the development of OTC trading, where whales prefer to make transactions, and as a rule, the common market does not increase volatility.

Institutional investment is increasingly seen as the future of cryptocurrency. According to the TABB Group report, the OTC market is about three times the global market turnover of cryptocurrencies. Given that bitcoin platforms conduct operations of about $4 billion per day, the volume of over-the-counter trading of the main cryptocurrency reaches $12 billion.

Therefore, with the entry of institutional investors into the mass crypto market, the ratio between exchange and OTC trading should change significantly.

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