Bitso Buys Gibraltar-Based Crypto Derivatives Platform Quedex

Latin America-focused exchange Bitso has bought Quedex, a crypto derivatives trading platform, based and regulated in Gibraltar.

Bitso, backed by Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and others, was in the news last December, having raised a whopping $62 million to help scale the business into new territories and clearly also to explore new products. 

The commercial terms of the Quedex acquisition were not made public, but Bitso CEO Daniel Vogel told CoinDesk it was a good fit for a number of reasons. 

Quedex was the first crypto derivatives platform to receive a license through Gibraltar’s digital asset regulatory framework, the same jurisdiction and regime that regulates Bitso, said Vogel. The Quedex acquisition also allows Bitso to get its hands on some nice cutting-edge tech, he added.

“As the industry grows and trading volumes increase, one of the big challenges is building really high-performance, low-latency trading engines, and the Quedex team has done that,” said Vogel in an interview. “So, the idea is to replace our entire trading infrastructure with Quedex’s trading infrastructure.”

Bitso’s growth plans

As well as demand to move into territories like Brazil, customers of Mexico City-based Bitso have also been asking for more sophisticated products such as leveraged trading, crypto futures and options, Vogel said.

“We’ve only offered spot trading until now,” Vogel said. “What we see is that there’s been so much financial education that’s happened through crypto. A few years ago, clients were asking what’s the difference between a limit order and a market order. Today they are asking to trade futures and options on Bitso.”

Vogel explained that a team of 22 staffers, many of them Quedex engineers, would be overseeing the integration of the new trading engine technology. At the last count, Bitso had some 200 employees spread over 25 countries.

“That increased to 230 as of this morning,” said Vogel.