Profile of Susquehanna, one of the first major Wall Street institutional investors to create a Bitcoin trading desk, as it looks to expand to more crypto assets
SAN FRANCISCO — While a number of large financial institutions have discussed trading Bitcoin, one firm has already begun doing it.
Context & Ripple Effects
The timing matters: in the same month this profile ran, Goldman Sachs announced it would open its own Bitcoin trading operation, and NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange was reported building a platform that would let large investors buy and hold Bitcoin directly. Susquehanna is the counterpoint — a major firm that stopped discussing and started trading, and is now pushing past Bitcoin into additional crypto assets.
The gap it fills is real: as related coverage notes, crypto firms were largely shunned by big banks, leaving smaller players like Silvergate to capture that business. An established proprietary trading firm operating a desk signals that the [[concepts#crypto-legitimacy-gap|legitimacy gap]] between crypto markets and institutional finance is starting to close from the trading side.
First-order effects
- Susquehanna gains a first-mover position in institutional crypto trading while rivals like Goldman Sachs are still weeks away from launching their own operations — its expansion into more assets widens that lead.
Second-order effects
- Goldman's entry and ICE's platform build-out mean Susquehanna will soon compete for the same institutional flow, pressuring spreads and pushing all three toward broader asset coverage; crypto-native firms gain a second liquidity source beyond small banks like Silvergate.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds through the corpus: by 2021-2022 Goldman had moved from futures to an over-the-counter crypto trade with Galaxy Digital and then Bitcoin-collateralized cash loans — early desks like Susquehanna's normalized crypto enough that Wall Street graduated from trading to lending against it.
The trend: Wall Street's crypto engagement is progressing from talk to trading desks to full balance-sheet services, with each institutional entrant lowering the barrier for the next.