A group of former Morgan Stanley executives is building a cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform.
Based in Sinagpore, Phemex is the brainchild of Jack Tao, an 11 year Morgan Stanley veteran who worked as a software engineer on the bank's electronic trading desk, specialising in high frequency trading.
Tao has assembled a group of eight former Morgan Stanley staffers for the new venture, which wants to be "the world's most trustworthy crytpocurrency derivatives trading platform".
Phemex already offers perpetual contracts for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin, and says it plans to add contracts backed by traditional products such as S&P stocks, metals and energy next year.
The platform is tapping a "user orientated" approach - inviting feedback to help develop more powerful features for traders to easily buy and sell contracts with trust.
The firm has built its own "hierarchical deterministic cold wallet system", which assigns an independent deposit address to each user, so that all assets are kept in cold wallets.