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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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6) For a traditional exchange, on the other hand, what *can* they monetize? a) order matching, though people can go to a competitor b) their data, which no one else has that's pretty much it, and so it's not surprising they end up getting significant revenue from data.
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Thanks for writing this Sam, very informative. I thought of this from a game theory perspective & information symmetry. If you want to be able to predict the future of a game, you need everyone to have access to all the data [know rules of the game] - hard to predict otherwise.
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