Nelson Minier, Head of OTC Sales & Trading at Kraken

This episode of The Scoop features Nelson Minier, Head of OTC Sales and Trading at Kraken, discussing how the exchange built out its institutional trading desk to serve clients moving large blocks of digital assets. Minier joined Kraken from a background in traditional finance trading, bringing experience in equities and foreign exchange markets to a crypto exchange working to professionalize its institutional offering. 

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By August 2019, Kraken had been expanding aggressively beyond its retail exchange roots, adding margin products, futures through its Crypto Facilities acquisition, and a dedicated OTC desk designed to let hedge funds, trading firms, and high-net-worth clients execute large trades without moving the visible order book. The conversation comes at a moment when institutional interest in crypto was picking back up following bitcoin's 2019 price recovery, making OTC infrastructure an increasingly important part of exchanges' competitive positioning.

Minier walks through how an OTC desk functions inside a crypto exchange, including how trades are sourced, priced, and settled away from the public book, and why large traders prefer that route over risking slippage on-exchange. He discusses the types of clients Kraken's desk served, from proprietary trading firms to family offices exploring crypto allocations for the first time, and how demand differed across bitcoin, ether, and smaller altcoins. He also addresses how his prior experience in legacy markets informed his approach to building trust with institutional counterparties still cautious about counterparty risk, settlement finality, and the operational maturity of crypto trading venues.

The two also discuss the competitive dynamics among exchanges racing to build out institutional services at the time, including Kraken's approach to compliance and security as differentiators, and how liquidity was fragmenting or consolidating across venues as more sophisticated players entered the market. Minier shares his outlook on what further growth in institutional OTC volume might look like as more traditional finance participants tested the waters in digital assets. The conversation offers a practitioner's view of how crypto exchanges were adapting institutional trading practices from legacy markets during a formative period for the industry's infrastructure.