Exclusive: Q&A With Graham Rodford, CEO and Co-Founder of Archax

CV: Starting off, can you explain what Archax is and how you are different from your market competitors?

Graham: Archax is a forthcoming regulated, institutional-grade crypto exchange, based in London and focused on security tokens. The vast majority of existing crypto exchanges are focused purely on cryptocurrencies and the retail space. There are some that are looking at security tokens and the institutional world, but Archax is different from these because of the combinations of a number of factors.

Firstly, the team and advisory board behind Archax all come from the traditional financial markets space. Many other venues have been built by technologists and crypto enthusiast who don’t understand the institutional community and its needs. The team behind Archax all come from the regulated institutional world, and know and understand the processes and controls that institutions need and expect to ensure compliance with regulators and their clients’ demands.

Secondly, we are based and regulated in London. Many other crypto exchanges have looked to peripheral markets like Malta and Gibraltar as bases and jurisdictions for regulation. Although there is nothing in principle wrong with that, our experience from the traditional financial markets world is that institutions typically want to use markets based and regulated in the main financial centres of the world. London is the world’s main financial centre, and although being based and regulated here is more costly and onerous, it is what the team are already familiar with and used to, and we believe this is a key differentiator.

Thirdly, our focus on just institutions. Unlike some other exchanges which aim to handle both retail and institutional flow, Archax will only serve institutions and all members will have undergone KYC, AML, source of funds checks, etc. So firms using Archax will know who their trading counterparties and that they are only dealing with other professional investors.

Finally our focus on security tokens. We believe that the tokenization of assets provides the most exciting ‘use case’ for blockchain technology, and one that has the potential to revolutionise financial markets by creating new global, secondary markets for illiquid and hard to trade assets, new more efficient ways of raising capital globally and better and more frictionless ways of handling the trading of traditional financial asse...

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