Michael Moro, CEO of Genesis Global Trading

In this episode of The Scoop, Frank Chaparro and Ryan Todd interview Michael Moro, Chief Executive Officer at Genesis Trading / Genesis Capital. Genesis Trading is a Digital Currency Group company providing over the counter digital currency trading for high net worth individuals or institutions. In their conversation, Frank, Ryan, and Michael discuss legacy OTC firm's adoption of crypto, the challenges of handling big alt-coin transactions, and how crypto lending markets are heating up.

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Genesis, a subsidiary of Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group, had established itself as one of the largest over-the-counter trading desks serving hedge funds, family offices, and other institutional players looking to move significant size in bitcoin and other digital assets without disrupting exchange order books. Moro, who took over as CEO in 2018, walks through how that OTC business developed alongside the firm's growing crypto lending arm, Genesis Capital, which by early 2019 had originated hundreds of millions of dollars in loans collateralized by digital assets.

The timing of the conversation, coming as bitcoin staged a strong recovery from the prior year's bear market, made it a natural moment to assess how institutional appetite for crypto exposure was evolving. Moro discusses the mechanics of institutional lending in crypto markets, including who was borrowing, what collateral requirements looked like, and how demand differed between trading firms seeking leverage and miners looking to manage cash flow without selling their bitcoin holdings. He also addresses how Genesis built trust with institutional counterparties still wary of custody risk and market manipulation, and how the firm's relationship with sister companies under the DCG umbrella, including Grayscale, shaped its position in the market.

The two also touch on liquidity conditions across major exchanges and how OTC desks like Genesis's helped smooth out price discovery for large trades. Beyond the mechanics of the business, Moro shares his view on where institutional adoption of crypto was headed, what remained the biggest obstacles for larger allocators considering the asset class, and how infrastructure providers like Genesis were positioning themselves to capture that demand as it materialized. The conversation offers a grounded look at the plumbing of institutional crypto markets at a moment when that infrastructure was still being built out in real time, well before it became a much larger and more competitive segment of the industry.