MIT-Born Crypto Company Floating Point Group Raises $2 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • May 29, 2020
  • Floating Point Group (FPG), a company that simplifies how institutional traders deploy algorithmic systems for cryptocurrency trading, announced it has closed $2 million

Floating Point Group (FPG), a company that simplifies how institutional traders deploy algorithmic systems for cryptocurrency trading, announced it has closed $2 million in seed funding from AngelList & MetaStable Capital founder Naval Ravikant, pif.vc, Algorand’s CEO Steve Kokinos, BoxOne Ventures, Seabury Global Markets, and several asset management executives. FPG is known for providing a US-regulated single-point-of-access for trading with a suite of algorithmic execution tools and with this investment, the company will aggressively expand its engineering staff along with acquiring regulatory licenses in the U.S. for broadening the jurisdictions it can serve.

Launched at MIT, FPG is accelerating the growth of cryptocurrency trading. And it offers a consolidated and regulated API for advanced order execution and real-time market data being used by some of the largest and highest performing quantitative traders in the cryptocurrency space. And its API leverages partner settlement networks enabling fast and performant order execution that can happen partly or entirely from an account with a qualified custodian.

“It’s becoming clear that sophisticated quantitative traders and platform developers are viewing the cryptocurrency markets as an exciting new opportunity,” said John Peurifoy, CEO of FPG. “As this market matures, we’ll continue to add critical pieces of the prime brokerage stack through innovations and strategic partnerships with other high-quality groups to deliver a holistic experience that meets the technical requirements of algorithmic traders or other groups building trading applications.”

FPG’s API enables delivery of real-time and historical market data across the most liquid exchange and non-exchange venues, the execution of trades directly on those markets using FPG’s smart order router to source liquidity, and the ability to trade on credit when funds are held with qualified custodians. So far, FPG has executed hundreds of millions of dollars of trades and is feeding market data to more than 20 organizations.

“Liquidity in cryptocurrency markets is extremely fragmented – getting best execution involves not only multiple exchanges but routing through multiple pairs on each exchange,” added Josh Felker, founder of BoxOne Ventures and previous partner at DRW. “FPG has built the most rigorous quantitative approach to this problem that I’ve seen and their performance and slippage stats are proof.”