Fireblocks Opens Stablecoin Marketplace, Takes No Spread on Trades

Fireblocks opened a marketplace on Thursday that lets payments firms request stablecoin quotes from several over-the-counter desks at once, compare them side by side and execute with whichever desk they choose. The company says it takes no spread on those trades and stays out of the flow of funds: the customer and the desk settle with each other directly, and Fireblocks does not take custody of assets at the point of conversion.

That puts the price request, the comparison and the trade inside a platform a payments firm already runs, instead of across a chat window. The desks, not Fireblocks, set the prices.

The Last Manual Step in Stablecoin Payments

Fireblocks describes the current setup in its own post: payment companies and trading firms source liquidity from a handful of OTC desks, with quoting happening "over Telegram, sometimes email, or each desk's own portal, one desk at a time." Credit lines, balances and live prices get tracked separately.

Liquidity Market is meant to collapse that onto one screen. Fireblocks says the product lets payment companies, and any business sourcing liquidity from OTC desks, request quotes from every desk they work with at once, compare them side by side and execute against the best price without leaving Fireblocks.

What Connect, Compare and Trade Do

On its product page, Fireblocks breaks the workflow into three steps. Clients link providers and watch credit, margin and balances in one view. They request and compare live streaming quotes from all liquidity providers. The trade then executes "instantly with full lifecycle tracking and complete trade history."

At launch the product covers major stablecoins against the dollar, euro, pound and other G10 currencies, and is available to Fireblocks customers worldwide.

B2C2 and Zodia Quote First, Six Desks Expected

B2C2 and Zodia Markets are quoting from day one, which matches the blog's note that they are the first liquidity providers, with more desks joining the directory shortly after. Cumberland, FalconX, GSR, Hercle, Nonco and Wintermute are expected to join.

Five payments companies helped shape it: MoneyGram, OpenPayd, Reap, TapTapSend and Zepz. A Reap comment carried on the product page points at why: Reap has been expanding into Asia after its acquisition by Payward, and "every new APAC market brings its own currency, regulator and liquidity requirements, and no single desk covers them all."

The Scale Fireblocks Is Pointing At

Fireblocks says more than $300 billion in stablecoin volume moved across its platform each month on average over the past year. Payments is its fastest-growing segment, up 110% year over year. More than 10 non-bank desks supply payment companies on the platform at multi-billion-dollar scale, and more than 325 payment companies are customers.

Those figures are Fireblocks' own, published in the post announcing the launch, written by Richard Astle, its VP of business development for the Fireblocks Network, on 15 October. The company also says it secures more than $10 trillion in digital asset transactions across 120+ blockchains, with customers including Worldpay, BNY, Galaxy and Revolut.

What the Marketplace Does Not Cover

Fireblocks is not the counterparty. On the blog it says the network stays neutral, never taking the other side of a trade, coming into the flow of funds or taking possession of assets. The product page adds a caveat worth reading before assuming a desk is reachable: liquidity providers are independent third parties, and availability varies by provider and jurisdiction.

The model is narrower than a settlement network, and it lands next to other pushes into payments. Stablecoin settlement has been moving onto public chains elsewhere, from Fiserv's Solana rollout to Polygon's TRON support for cross-border transfers.

Fireblocks says more desks will join the directory shortly after launch. That is the part that decides whether a payments firm can stop keeping a chat app open for quotes.