Virtex Technologies, a year-old London-based vendor positioning itself as an “operating system for digital asset brokerages”, has selected Gold-i, an established FX and crypto connectivity firm, as its first integration partner. The pairing connects Virtex’s front-end and brokerage workflow platform to Gold-i’s MatrixNET liquidity management layer, giving clients single-point access to more than 35 crypto exchanges and 80 FX liquidity providers.
On its own, the announcement is a vendor tie-up at the early infrastructure layer of a still-young market. Read alongside larger industry moves, such as Bullish’s $4.2 billion all-stock agreement to acquire share registry and transfer agent Equiniti, announced earlier this month, it sits within a broader pattern. Digital asset and traditional finance infrastructure are no longer running on parallel tracks. They are converging on each other, from both directions, and the architectural pattern increasingly being adopted is component-based: specialist providers, slotted in at each layer, composed into a working stack rather than built end-to-end.The operating-system pitch
Virtex was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in London. Its modular platform covers the full lifecycle of a digital asset brokerage business – client onboarding, risk, trading, reporting and operational workflows – with what the firm describes as pluggable market connectivity, custody and compliance layers.
“You can build a brokerage by going to market and picking bespoke specialist solutions for every layer of the stack,” Ben Radclyffe, Virtex’s founder and CEO, tells TradingTech Insight. “The problem then becomes integrating them – getting each piece to work properly with the others. Virtex flips that around. We give you a platform and a starter set of modules to get the business running quickly and efficiently. Once you mature and know what you actually need, you go out and pick the specialists that fit and plug them in.”
The build-everything-yourself alternative, Radclyffe argues, tends to underestimate the true cost of stitched-together vendor stacks. “What actually happens is you end up hiring a large IT department to plug all those things together, and then an enormous operations team to run the thing, because it’s not that simple.”
The Gold-i integration is the first practical test of the model. Radclyffe says the integration itself took around 90 minutes from API key handover to a working demonstration of live trading and market data feeds. A first joint client – currently in pre-live stage and unnamed – is already in place.
Why connectivity first
The architectural question worth asking is why connectivity (rather than custody, compliance or risk, for example) became the first module Virtex chose to partner on rather than build itself. The answer points to where the highest-friction problems sit in a modern digital asset brokerage stack.
For Tom Higgins, CEO of Gold-i, the connectivity layer is the part that firms most consistently underestimate when they attempt to build in-house. “The core bit we sit in is bridging the worlds of digital assets and traditional finance,” he says. “Because we sit so nicely between those two, we connect everything together, and we understand the practicalities on both sides.”
That bridging position has reshaped Gold-i’s pipeline. “A lot of the new business we do is where you’ve got FX or CFD brokers who want access to digital asset products,” Higgins notes. “They want to be able to connect to multiple exchanges, market makers, ECNs, but they don’t know how to. They need something simple to connect it all in, with ultra-low latency.”
The two directions of travel
The convergence is not one-directional. While established FX and CFD brokers are reaching into digital assets via connectivity layers, crypto-native firms are increasingly moving in the opposite direction – into traditional FX, and beyond.
What is driving the FX leg, Radclyffe argues, is less about trading capability than about cross-border money movement. “Crypto’s biggest use case at the moment is stable coins driving international trade. You bypass the two- or three-day settlement process, no weekend close, no bank holiday close – moving money around the world. A lot of the big firms, and certainly some of my target client base, are on-ramping currency into typically US-denominated stable coins. To do that, you need the FX leg as well.”The settlement-speed differential is the harder argument to dismiss. Radclyffe cites the example of cross-border equity settlement around regional holidays, where proceeds from a Tokyo sale can take more than a week to clear into a US dollar position because of T+3 sequencing and holiday closures – a delay that simply does not exist as a problem on-chain.
The clearest live demonstration of the principle is Hyperliquid, the decentralised derivatives venue currently valued at around $11 billion and consistently handling more than half of all on-chain perpetuals volume. A 24/7 venue with instant settlement, built by a small team in a short space of time, replicating instruments that the established derivatives exchanges have offered for decades, is increasingly drawing attention from incumbent venues.
What transfers, and what doesn’t
If the Bullish-Equiniti deal points to the long-term direction – crypto-native firms acquiring the legal and operational plumbing of traditional capital markets – the architectural lessons running in the other direction are more immediate. Not every TradFi habit is worth preserving, but the operational discipline is.
“If you constantly solve problems using spreadsheets, Python scripts and hiring people, you won’t have a business for very long,” Radclyffe observes. “That’s a lesson from TradFi worth remembering.”
That dual current – TradFi discipline transferring into the digital asset stack, crypto-native firms reaching into traditional capital markets infrastructure – frames a broader question that institutional market participants have yet to resolve. A panel at A-Team Group’s ExchangeTech Summit in London earlier this month described “a parallel market structure forming on-chain, populated largely by retail flow, perpetuals, and tokenised wrappers on traditional exposures”, and noted that the unresolved institutional question is at what point – and on what instruments – the two stacks begin to compete for the same liquidity.
Brokerage infrastructure of the kind Virtex and Gold-i are building is one of the layers at which that competition will be played out. Several layers above it, larger transactions are reshaping the convergence at venue and registry level. But the architectural pattern represented at the brokerage layer – traditional operational discipline, applied to a digital asset stack designed for composability from the outset, with specialist firms slotted in at each layer – is increasingly the design assumption across the institutional digital asset infrastructure landscape. The bidirectional drift, in other words, has reached the brokerage layer.
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