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1) Why crypto exchanges make their data free
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It's interesting how in crypto monetizing market data isn't a thing. This is *the* $ maker for stock exchanges. Crypto ppl would go nuts if exchanges in the space started charging for this. Don't think this will happen soon bc crypto exchanges have so many other ways to make $ twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status…
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2) Traditional exchanges are, mostly, matching engines. The rest of the infrastructure -- brokers, margin, risk, clearing, custody, GUIs, APIs, etc. -- fall on other companies in the pipeline. When you buy a stock on , ~10 different companies are involved.
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3) In crypto, the norm is different. Crypto exchanges are full stack products, building the entire experience. When you buy a BTC on , there are only 3 companies involved: the buyer, the seller, and the exchange.
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4) This means that crypto exchanges: a) build much more of the stack b) have a much higher take rate on trades because they have much less loss on fees to other middlemen
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5) Crypto exchanges don't *need* to charge for marketdata--it would only increase our revenue by like 5% anyway. And the cost would be making it harder for anyone to find out about us. Which is really bad, because unlike trad exchanges we don't have pseudo regulatory duopolies.
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7) Which system is better? I don't know; there are pros and cons to each! But it is certainly a good property of crypto that everyone can get full access to data for free.
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To some degree this is true but the big futures exchanges are CCPs. There's prolly some convergence so maybe throttled data will always be free. But you want pure unadulterated colo'd data it may cost you. For tradfi maybe oracles are used to circumvent onerous exch mkt data fees
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You take a firm like Citadel and they stream zillions quotes. Maybe buy from data from them or maybe get the data from them for order flow. Obviously who knows but major disruptive potential.
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