Another major independent investment bank now has a dedicated cryptocurrency and digital asset division. Cowen was able to confirm this yesterday as they officially launched this new division of their bank. This bank has long been associated with forward-thinking and from design to inception, this whole process has taken over one year.
The firm announced on the 23rd of March that Cowen will be able to offer its users trade execution and custody for Bitcoin as well as several other notable altcoins. They also announced their intention to add to the list of assets that will be tradeable over time.
Plans have been in the making for quite some time now with the initial rumours starting in May 2021 when they started working in tandem with Standard Custody and Trust Company. During this time they invested $25 million in their parent company PolySign. This coincidentally is a company that was co-founded by Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz.
Through this announcement, Cowen acknowledged that they had been wanting to announce these plans earlier but due to the nature of the research and fundamentals required to launch such a division they has to spend 15 months working on the infrastructure for this division to be in a place suitable for launching. CEO Jeffrey M. Solomon said this when talking about these exciting new developments.
“Through Cowen Digital, our clients now have access to the crypto and digital asset markets with our institutional quality and fully integrated end-to-end execution and custody capabilities.”
It won’t have escaped some of you that this news comes right after Goldman Sachs were able to execute its first-ever over the counter crypto options trade. This was a trade deal with giant investment firm Galaxy Digital.
This is exciting news for the crypto markets and not something that should be dismissed as large companies trying to appease a younger demographic. The amount of money and research that would have gone into this division would have been tremendous and for me at least it represents a significant change in the way that big corporations are thinking about how crypto will be used in our daily lives in the near future.
