A Regulation Ready, Digital Asset Exchange

Clearpool, a company of veteran innovators harking from Wall Street and the City, are building the world’s first truly tokenised Multilateral Trading Facility — bringing a fully digitised institutional-grade derivatives exchange, with no venue-driven custodial risk, under FCA authorisation and into the European markets.

Designed and built by a concentration of global exchange experts — with decades of experience — to the highest technology and regulatory standards. Clearpool will bring a new standard for reliability and performance to cryptoasset trading, and set the tone for a whole new approach to financial service delivery.

Tokenised MiFID
Instruments

Trade fully tokenised derivatives and security tokens, with exposures to the most liquid cryptoassets of today and the digitised assets of tomorrow.

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No Venue-driven
Custodial Risk

Our unique technology means we never own member funds, so if somehow we go down any funds being matched on behalf of members are returned.

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Equities Grade
Performance

No artificial rate limits, no jitter, no downtime, just raw speed with ultra-low latency, from the people who pioneered modern exchange architecture.

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Digitisation meets Regulation

Digitisation that makes sense

Decentralise Risk, not Responsibility

Clearpool’s unique design and technology means we never take ownership of member funds. In short, we don’t use traditional wallet-based custody solutions to hold member funds, and so if the venue is somehow hacked your funds remain yours and remain safe.

Instead we support a cooperative commit and lock approach to fund access. This gives the venue the guarantees it needs to ensure orders are appropriately backed and can be made firm. It also allows us to fulfil our matching obligations, while our members ensure their custodial risk is limited to their own custodial solutions, over which they have full control.

Digitise for Infrastructure Resilience

Blockchains are often too slow for practical use. Settling a handful of trades every 15 seconds is not an infrastructure that can support viable markets. It's why all existing crypto exchanges are wallet operators first and foremost. Blockchains are slow, but they are extremely resilient.

At Clearpool we understand this, and have spent several years exploring how we can capitalise on that resilience without those speed limitations. We have developed technology that allows us to scale the resilience and security characteristics of a blockchain, and therefore permit equities grade exchange performance.

First Class support for Regulations

Regulations unlock
Market Value

Effective regulation of cryptoassets is the key to fully unlocking their potential. Regulation done right will bring cryptoasset technology into the mainstream and enable incumbent financial service providers to participate seamlessly in a new digitised world. Regulators are moving away from treating cryptoassets as an asset class and instead reasoning about digitisation as a medium of instrument transfer, with cryptoassets themselves classified in terms of their financial characteristics.

Our innovative technology de-risks participation while allowing financial services to selectively achieve regulatory authorisation only for those activities that are central to their business proposition. Simpler for service providers wishing to digitise existing business models, and simpler for regulators attempting to authorise them. That means greater adoption and better markets for all.

Blockchain enhanced
Regulatory Compliance

Operating regulated markets and ensuring compliance is hard, and participants have no option but to trust that the regulators have got it right. But we can do better. Clearpool has developed a unique approach to tracking internal venue state that allows the creation and publication of real-time verifiable market data that participants can use to validate expected venue behaviour.

It's more than that though. We use an underlying, cryptographically secure, surveillance event stream with a derivable arbitration event stream. By anchoring these streams to a censorship resistant blockchain we achieve a perfectly scalable, irrefutable, audit trail that allows regulators to verify all venue behaviour — full transparency with no information leakage. Better yet, this can also be used with non-crypto assets such as a traditional equities dark pool.

Innovation — We see what others don't

Pioneers in Capital Markets

Clearpool is a pioneer in capital markets, market structure and financial technology. We use our knowledge and innovations to build and operate next generation execution and trading services, in both the traditional capital markets, and the tokenised market space.

We have extensive experience, and are world leaders in, ultra low latency exchange and market infrastructure solutions, as well as holding deep expertise in tokenisation offerings including distributed ledger technologies such as blockchains and cryptoassets. In addition we have designed and built successful ML driven trading systems with market leading performance.

Technology that delivers

As the experts behind most modern high performance, ultra low latency exchange architectures, our influence can be found in well over 100 venues around the globe.

We specialise in building and deploying high value, high performance systems whether deployed to commodity hardware or to the cloud, and are creators of the “algorithmic architecture” approach to system development.

If you like your technology stacks to decode complex FIX messages in only 250 nanoseconds, or service millions of messages per second jitter-free, then you will benefit from the performance our platforms can offer.

Algorithmic Architecture

Clearpool's technology is built on solid foundations, by leaders of the industry. Not only industry experts we are also recognised experts in the development community.

One thing that sets Clearpool apart from the competition is their unique Algorithmic Architecture approach to development. Algorithmic Architecture had its genesis in PhD research and has evolved over two decades.

It has become a key approach to tackling the hard problems of creating resilient, high performance systems that consider all constraints, including people. To learn more you can explore the many talks on the subject available on this site.

Community and Thought Leaders

For us technology and problem solving is a passion. We are constantly looking for innovative solutions to the problems we encounter. It's what makes us tick and we like to share that passion and knowledge with our communities, be it technology or industry.

A company is its people and our people have a long track record of leading in their communities. Participation in the open source community is part of our strategy and we ensure projects contributed to by our people are actively supported. Projects like the industry standard networking library asio and the scons-based build system Cuppa. You've probably heard of asio, or boost::asio before — it's the networking library that underpins many ultra low latency financial systems, as well payment networks like Ripple, blockchains like Ethereum, and utility libraries like libtorrent.

In addition to direct community participation through open source we actively support some of our people as members of the International Standards Organisation C++ Committee who have been helping shape the C++ language for many years. We also talk at conferences and industry events on topics like Market Microstructure, Agile Development, Architecture, People in Technology, Programming, Testing, and Real-time Machine Learning. With whatever time we have left we also run meetups, organise conferences and sit on the programme committees of others.

Community at Heart

Trusted Advisor and Solution Provider

When you need a partner who cares as much as you do

In support of Clearpool’s business strategy, Clearpool also operates a technical services and consultancy business that helps broaden Clearpool’s market experience and offers wider exposure for our technology. From smaller start-up style projects to full exchange deployments we have you covered.

As well as technology focused engagements we also have significant experience of assisting with transformation and integration programmes, both in the context of M&As, or significant regulatory driven change. In particular we can advise on the development of people and technology strategies that effectively support wider business goals.

We offer both resource scoped engagements (on a times and materials basis), as well as engagements centred around fully scoped work packages to build and deliver core, or critical components, including IP licensing if appropriate. To compliment this we can help with sourcing and building in-house teams to ensure long term success. We can also help structure attractive, positive-return R&D initiatives, along with support in preparation, submission and delivery of associated funding opportunities.

Here are some of our clients covering areas such as real time AI and ML, algorithmic tradin, cryptoasset infrastructure scaling, exchange technology and FIX engines:

In short, if you have outstanding delivery needs and challenges, or are people and technology constrained, then we would be happy to sit down and explore if we could help.

Who We Are

A proven team of City and Wall Street professionals

With decades of hands-on experience in the financial services and fintech sectors, Clearpool has a solid team that has proven its ability to deliver time and again. That hands-on experience ranges from acting as a technical witness to the SEC after the May 6th 2010 Flash Crash, to overseeing MiFID II compliance programmes, to designing, building and deploying some of the world's most complex exchanges.

Our extensive experience, combined with our ability to innovate and deliver has been hard earned across a number of sectors within the financial industry. From the world's most prolific exchange providers to the most iconic exchange operators, from the world's largest inter-dealer broker to the most well known investment and retail banks, rounded off with experience from several of the financial infrastructure companies in-between. It was in these environments that our people developed and honed their skills.

Time spent building and advising technology startups has also helped curate valuable knowledge on how to iterate, grow and scale, both products and companies in a way that most financial service incumbents struggle to emulate. We believe that's just one reason why the financial services domain, and execution service provision sector in particular, has huge opportunities. Another reason is our experience has given us the visibility into the unique challenges of the space and the key insights into how we can address them.

Our History

Born in New York, Clearpool grew out of experiences from the financial crisis of 2008, and the many market structure issues that contributed or compounded those times. After the financial crisis regulators and service providers struggled to come to grips with the fast evolving landscape and the ever increasing impact of technology on how our services are run. It was in that context that we envisaged opportunities to address key market microstructure challenges while at the same time bringing regulators on a journey that could bridge the gap between their slow changing regulatory frameworks and the fast evolving technology that providers use to deliver them.

From the beginning we saw a key opportunity in the provision and operation of exchanges as key market infrastructure that represents a critical cross-section between the delivery of regulated activities and the provision of fair and healthy markets.

Our Vision

Our goal has always been the delivery of fair markets for all participants with intelligent and innovative support for the aspirations of the regulator. To do this we see two key areas: improvements to market microstructure to make measuring market fairness and quality more objective, and second to improve the infrastructure of market delivery itself to make it easier to decouple the regulation of interoperating activities, and provide better first class support for validation of the operation of fair and safe markets.

Clearpool's vision is to combine both these improvements into a regulated venue that can demonstrate tangible improvements to market microstructure while importantly making validation of the delivery of fair, quality markets, a verifiable and measurable quantity. We can achieve both of these goals by combining existing knowledge and IP we hold with regard to market microstructure with new technology we have developed that takes some of the innovations of the distributed ledger and blockchain space and applies them to solve the specific problems that we wish to address.

The Clearpool MTF will be the world's first fully tokenised MTF where digitisation plays an integral part of the trading infrastructure. This will allow the verification of all transactions and activity on the venue in both real time by participants and retrospectively by a regulator. In effect the venue acts as an irrefutable source of reference for the regulator and paves the way to a decrease in regulatory burden for participants while increasing insight and value for all.

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