🚢 Crossing over

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Last week, Coinbase announced that it would be integrating DEXs from Base to the Coinbase app. Woo-hoo.

But underneath the announcement, there’s some potentially positive tailwinds, Blockworks Research’s Daniel Shapiro wrote earlier this week. 

Shapiro looked at the potential impact for Aerodrome (which is backed by Coinbase Ventures).

“Embedding Base DEXs inside Coinbase lowers friction for millions of verified users to trade assets on Aerodrome that they previously did not have access to on Coinbase. With Aerodrome being the dominant DEX on Base, it is thus positioned to absorb disproportionate flow due to its lead over other Base DEXs,” Shapiro said.

See, we’re not kidding when we say we’re just getting started.

💂 Crossing over

Crossover’s officially expanding to the United States. 

I spoke to CEO Brandon Mulvihill about the move, institutional interest, and the rise of over-the-counter (OTC) trading. 

It’s probably already pretty obvious that this change is happening because of the shifting environment in the United States. Mulvihill told me it’s the perfect time for the team to enter the US markets — because it’s obviously a more favorable regulatory environment, but also because it looks like institutional interest is really picking up. 

“Almost the day after the election, the US institutions were calling us immediately,” he told me. Mulvihill and his other cofounders started their careers in TradFi, so they’re pretty familiar with both crypto and the more, well, traditional side of finance. 

And, with CrossX — its electronic communications network — Crossover does stand out as over-the-counter (OTC) trading picks up in crypto. 

“One of the big drivers we see internationally is that people are getting out of — especially the crypto-native market makers and…quant hedge fund — they're moving away from the on-exchange world into OTC trading, which should not be surprising, because if we look at the foreign exchange market, the same thing happened,” he said. Crossover is also the “largest OTC destination cleared by Hidden Road.”

He noted that even banks, which Mulvihill expects to be one of the “slowest financial institutions to the market” are already making headway, with the JPMorgan announcement about JPMD and stablecoin progress by the likes of Bank of America.

“They are all aggressively, from what we see, building out or finally finalizing battle plans,” he said, reiterating that he still thinks there’ll be a “little bit of time before [banks] come in.”

Add to that the regulatory changes on the horizon. Mulvihill told me that the Crossover team has offered comments on the market structure bill, which is still working its way through DC. He told me he’s heard that it could come between August to the end of the year, though he was cautious to actually predict a timeline. 

But the bill itself “changes the game,” he said, calling it “the most positive thing that, I think, has happened in crypto since the ETFs were launched.”

“As a result, what we're going to see are mainstream, blue-chip financial institutions coming in waves. I think we're going to see M&A explode. I think we're going to see investment explode. I think you're going to see a real explosion of new customers into the space as a result of this bill.”

And this just reiterates the market potential for Crossover.

“We just fundamentally don't believe that the institutional market can grow orders of magnitude in its current market structure form,” Mulvihill noted. Instead, it’ll evolve from here. Just like crypto has pushed TradFi to evolve, which is perhaps why Crossover is striking while the iron is heating up and moving into the US.

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From RWAs to modular infra, AI agents to mobile-first consumer apps, the builders making it real are heading to Brooklyn.

Permissionless IV is the definitive gathering for crypto's technical founders and builders.

📅 June 24–26 | Brooklyn