XBTO CEO Philippe Bekhazi looks back on the company on their 7th anniversary

It’s amazing to look back at how far we have come in the seven short years since XBTO grew from an ambitious vision into an established leader in global finance.

Back in 2015 we pooled our financial acumen and decided to serve as a crypto liquidity provider to the very thin and Bitcoin-dominated marketplace of the time. The promise of blockchain was there, but almost none of the necessary infrastructure was in place to bring it to its potential.

We branded as "XBT Opps", named after Bitcoin’s original ticker, XBT and ‘opportunities’. It was an exciting time, building relationships, experiencing the growing-pains and working alongside some of the most brilliant and dedicated pioneers in crypto. At XBTO, our task was to create market depth and consistency. In a word “liquidity”. We built the connections so that counterparties could always find a trading partner and so the markets never turned off.

As time went on, we ran our own book and began to focus more on taming volatility and improving price for our institutional partners. We made markets and provided liquidity to some of the largest exchanges. We’ve also been at the forefront of derivatives trading and involved early with some of the most well-known DeFi protocols.

In 2017 we began to expand into venture capital in the crypto space with XBTO Ventures. We also launched the XBTO Humla fund in 2020 to manage accredited investor capital.

We were early investors in Deribit exchange and are now jointly launching the first institutional-grade OTC block-trading and communications platform for crypto-derivatives with Paradigm. We also recently invested in Lukka, providing software solutions to streamline the middle and back-office functions of global finance.

Humla focuses investment on some of the most promising disruptive players and segments in crypto, for example we made an investment in Valkyrie who sponsored the second Bitcoin Futures ETF and also just announced the first bitcoin mining ETF with a strong emphasis on GSE responsible companies.

XBTO was one of the main sponsors of Bitcoin 2021 and Bitcoin 2022. In April of last year we opened our Miami office, then in September, we announced our partnership with Inter Miami CF as their first-ever jersey sponsor. This was done in co-ownership with entrepreneur Jorge Mas and soccer star David Beckham and was among the largest Major League Soccer sponsorship deals to date.

Our "Origin Story" goes into a great level of detail about our past activities, but we continue to grow every day since then. One of the most significant landmarks of this past year has been the opening of our regulated and licensed digital assets platform, through our company Stablehouse.

Early on we set “the democratization of money” as our end goal at XBTO. The Stablehouse retail platform brings us a step closer. It presents a large cohort of investors with a very easy, user-oriented way to participate in a wide range of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins.

XBTO sees no shortage of opportunity in the future. We will continue to grow with an open mind to all the possibilities of crypto and invest wherever we can make the most meaningful impact.