financemagnates.com
Flow Traders, the principal trading firm, said today (Thursday) it has opened an over-the-counter desk offering continuous, two-way liquidity for tokenized money-market funds, equities, and commodities, with Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund and Tether's gold-backed token XAU₮ among the initial products covered.
The desk is designed to run around the clock, seven days a week, and targets permissioned institutional counterparties that, the company said, need to manage equity and commodity exposure when traditional exchanges are closed.
Counterparties can trade tokenized equity and commodity exposures against fiat currencies or stablecoins, using standard OTC workflows with defined settlement processes.
Overnight Volumes Driving the Push
Flow Traders CEO Thomas Spitz framed the launch as the latest step in a longer shift in how investors access market exposure. "Over the past two decades, evolving market structures, from ETFs to electronic trading, have transformed how investors access exposure," Spitz said. "Tokenization has the potential to be one of the next major steps in that evolution."
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The company stated that in some large-cap U.S. stocks, combined activity across tokenized and synthetic markets has "at times reached around 2-3% of the notional trading volume of their primary U.S. listings," with much of that activity occurring outside regular U.S. market hours. Flow Traders did not identify which stocks or cite an independent source for those figures.
The firm's move into tokenized OTC liquidity follows several years of building out its digital asset infrastructure. In 2023, Flow Traders' crypto subsidiary was registered by De Nederlandsche Bank as a provider of crypto services in the Netherlands, authorizing the firm to offer spot OTC cryptocurrency liquidity and make markets in crypto exchange-traded products.
Tether Gold Included From Day One
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the partnership reflects a broader pickup in demand for gold exposure across both traditional and on-chain markets.
"Demand for gold, both in traditional markets and on chain, has accelerated as investors look for resilient stores of value in a more uncertain macro environment," Ardoino commented. "Liquidity providers such as Flow Traders play a critical role in ensuring that tokenized assets like XAU₮ can trade efficiently across venues and reach a broader set of market participants."
Ardoino added that "supporting XAU₮ across multiple exchanges and through their OTC desk helps strengthen the market structure around digital representations of physical gold," framing the arrangement as an infrastructure improvement rather than a purely commercial one.
The desk provides what the firm describes as risk controls designed specifically for overnight and weekend market conditions, though it did not elaborate on the mechanics of those controls.
Institutional OTC Market Faces Consolidation
The launch places Flow Traders among a growing field of firms building infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets, even as the broader OTC liquidity provider market faces growing pressure.
A survey published by Finery Markets in early 2026 found that 60% of institutional OTC participants expected the number of active liquidity providers to fall before year-end, suggesting consolidation may be approaching even as new entrants expand into the space.
Flow Traders has been broadening its digital asset presence on multiple fronts over recent years. The firm joined DWS and Galaxy Digital in a joint venture to develop a euro-denominated stablecoin, and was named the sole liquidity provider in TP ICAP's institutional crypto trading platform when it launched in 2021.
The new OTC desk extends that activity into the tokenized asset space, where discussion at Davos in January centered on wholesale rather than retail applications as institutions began to treat tokenization as a practical infrastructure question rather than a speculative one.
Access and Availability
Institutions can reach the desk via direct FIX connectivity, OMS/EMS platforms, ECNs, or high-touch OTC execution.
The company declares that asset coverage will expand based on counterparty demand and regulatory considerations, and noted that product availability may vary by jurisdiction and counterparty eligibility, with different members of the Flow Traders group providing services depending on their regulatory status in a given market.