Digital asset adoption across the UAE and the broader MENA region is accelerating quickly, and institutional infrastructure is racing to catch up. Joining us on Capital Markets is Zane Suren, Chief Revenue Officer at Bridgeport — the middleware network helping institutions settle crypto trades across exchanges without tying up capital at every venue. Zane, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
You have put a number on this — about $60 billion tied up in off-exchange settlement inefficiency. Walk us through where the capital is actually stuck and why the old model of pre-funding every exchange does not work anymore.
In most traditional asset classes, you do not pre-fund a venue before you trade. You hold your assets with a custodian or bank and trade on any venue — settlement happens post-trade. This is the result of many decades of institutional market development. In crypto, that infrastructure has not caught up. The way digital asset native trading firms have solved this is by sending value to the exchange before the trade. We believe the $60 billion figure is actually understating it. If you look at the FX market, it trades about $10 trillion a day. Crypto trades between $50 to $60 billion a day. The infrastructure has not evolved to allow operational efficiency and liquidity to flow as it should. We are building the middleware so that institutions can leave assets with any custodian, have them allocated in milliseconds to any venue of choice, and trade efficiently across all venues. Once that infrastructure is in place, we should see a large increase in trading volumes in crypto — similar to what we see in traditional finance.
Traditional derivatives markets were standardised around the ISDA agreements decades ago. Why has crypto not had its own version of that yet — and is Bridgeport positioning itself to build that standard?
There are two sides to every deal — technical and non-technical. Legal agreements between custodians, venues, and trading firms are commonplace. ISDA solved this at scale for traditional markets. In digital assets, what has been happening is bilateral agreements that get renegotiated time and again. That typically takes firms between two and six months to align on parameters around dispute resolution, settlement frequency, and so on. Bridgeport is an API layer — we are not directly in the agreement. But we recognised this was a critical issue for our clients. So we launched the Digital Asset Master Agreement working group, called DHARMA, which allows trading firms, exchanges, and custodians to review a set of frameworks we have put together for the industry to grow and thrive. The only way we really grow this market is by working together. We would welcome any firm to join that working group.
What is actually happening on the ground in the MENA region with digital asset adoption, and where does Bridgeport fit into that growth story?
The Gulf specifically is very interesting — there has been a lot of regulatory clarity here for a long time. I have been in digital assets on the institutional side for eight years, and we wanted that clarity for a long time. VARA, ADGM, and the CMA have been in place for a long time now, and a lot of firms have come to this region to build. In a fast-moving market like crypto, clarity is absolutely everything. We are now starting to see other regions follow — Europe with MiCA, the US with the Clarity Act, Hong Kong and Singapore in APAC. Globally, regulators are pushing forward and providing the certainty that institutions need. One of the reasons I relocated from the UK to Abu Dhabi is for exactly that purpose. As middleware, we interact with venues, trading firms, custodians, prime brokers, and banks — and a lot of our clients and partners have hubs in the Middle East and are increasing their presence in terms of entity, staff, and client base. We are very much supporters of what this region has done for the digital asset space.
You are the one translating this infrastructure story into commercial traction. What does the sale actually look like for Bridgeport — are you convincing exchanges, custodians, or trading firms first?
We are a network business. From the trading firm perspective, they want to operate in an efficient market — allocate capital quickly, access liquidity, and do it effortlessly. We build the connectors so custodians and exchanges are available for them to do that. From the custodian and exchange perspective, they have experienced painful, long, bilateral integrations. We can build those connectors extremely quickly — within a couple of weeks — so they can continue focusing on their core business while we handle the technical integration and maintenance. And because it is a network business, it snowballs. The capital efficiency one trading firm experiences with one custodian on one exchange increases as we add more exchanges and custodians. We have started to add OTC desks and are in the process of adding prime brokers. We already exist in traditional markets — we are building it for this one.
Zane, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
