STS Digital is a leading institutional digital asset trading firm, and Maxime Seiler, advisor and MFTA member, brings 14 years across traditional finance and crypto. Today we are talking about institutional money moving into digital assets, the rise of structured products, and why STS believes a regulated bilateral model is the right way to bring Wall Street-grade risk management on-chain. Maxime, thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me. Good to see you.
You said the institutional stack is already here and crypto has built a 24/7 model — so why does traditional finance need to inherit these assets as they move on-chain?
If you zoom out over the last decade, what really happened is that crypto built a fully sandboxed trading infrastructure that operated completely outside the existing financial system. That isolation allowed the market to test everything — permissionless integrations, on-chain custody, new settlement processes, how to build markets from scratch. Over ten years, we have seen what works and what does not. Now we are at the point where the market is accepting what succeeded in that sandbox and integrating it into the traditional system — upgrading settlement, clearing, exchange, and trading from five days a week to 24/7 continuous markets.
Structured products are old news in traditional finance but new in crypto. Why is that, and what is the real sign that the market has matured?
It is really driven by market infrastructure. Options on Bitcoin and Ethereum have become very liquid and institutionally tradable over the last five years. But distribution has remained stuck — either users have to log into exchanges and know exactly what they want to trade, or they go on-chain into vaults that often carry additional risk layers and are capital inefficient. Structured products as a vehicle to solve this have not yet existed in digital assets in a proper form. A structured product transforms a complex asset class — volatility — into a simple product that investors can subscribe to, earn yield from, and get more tailored payoffs from. The room to grow here is significant, particularly in terms of distribution to the traditional investor landscape that has either no crypto exposure today or is not yet earning yield from digital assets.
You mentioned that Bitcoin volatility has hit record lows. What is driving that?
Crypto volatility has compressed significantly over the last decade — from the most volatile asset class in existence to one that is increasingly mature and moving closer to how traditional assets behave. There are two drivers. The first is the market itself maturing — more liquidity providers creating more consistent price discovery in spot markets. The second, which is less visible, is the rise of sophisticated investors selling options to generate yield. By selling options, they supply volatility to the market, which dampens the hedging impact and compresses the volatility of the asset class itself. It creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the more sophisticated strategies deploy volatility selling, the more it impacts the underlying, which then improves the risk-reward of the strategy itself. The oversupply of options is now driving Bitcoin volatility to almost record lows across the curve. Volatility spikes have also become much shallower. These are all signs of more institutions being in the space — not betting on this week's direction, but extracting yield from the options market.
Every structured product at STS is issued by STS as principal itself. Why is this the right model for institutional crypto?
We quote options and provide markets in over 400 digital assets today. Our clients — institutional investors from crypto-native to regulated traditional finance firms — come to STS because we are a principal liquidity provider for all derivatives. That means we have full flexibility to quote any strike, any maturity, any combination of options instantly, with no third-party dependency. No reliance on third-party market makers, no reliance on third-party liquidity provider infrastructure. Everything is done bilaterally, directly with our clients. That means they can trade a much broader and deeper range of options, with full flexibility around strike and maturity combinations, via the trading platform or API — enabling far more sophisticated strategies in a very straightforward way.
In five to ten years, what is the vision for STS?
Continued growth in what we have been building. What we are seeing in the market is the convergence of the isolated crypto sandbox with a much more integrated market — where tokenised financial assets are tradable on-chain and crypto assets are tradable in the traditional market. We have positioned ourselves right at the intersection of both worlds. As these worlds collide and integrate into one unified 24/7 market, we see STS becoming the leading options trading platform and liquidity provider for digital asset options, but also for traditional financial assets that are tokenised and tradable on-chain.
Maxime, thank you so much for joining us. It is definitely interesting to see how you are evolving and what you are building in this space.
Thank you for having me.
