LMAX Group, the cross-asset marketplace for FX and digital assets, has grown its perpetual futures offering this year and is working on initiatives to increase the utility of digital assets. 

In September this year LMAX reported record first half results. Total volume was an all-time high of $5.3 trillion, up 23% from the previous record and average daily surpassed the previous record by 26% at $41bn, .

David Mercer, chief executive of LMAX Group, said in a statement: “These results demonstrate the strength of our proposition and growing institutional demand for a complete cross-asset marketplace spanning FX and digital assets. As markets evolve towards 24/7 trading, we are focused on leading this shift by combining the technology, liquidity and distribution institutions need to trade and move capital seamlessly across asset classes, around the clock.”

Jenna Wright, managing director, digital assets at LMAX Group, told Markets Media that the company benefits from not focusing just on crypto. She said: “We have built our suite of products and solutions for all seasons. Gold has done wonders for us, particularly in the first quarter.”

Since the last gold run about 18 months ago, LMAX spent time building liquidity pools for gold for different brokers and banks, and Wright said this all came together nicely at the end of last year. For brokers, between 70% and 90% of their flow has been gold, and LMAX has been trying to slowly educate them on perpetual futures, especially on the benefit of being able to trade over weekends. 

LMAX launched perpetual futures in September 2025, initially with bitcoin/USD and ether/USD pairs. In September this year LMAX had about five times the volume in perpetual futures as in spot crypto.

Wright also argued that brokers could find that crypto venues will “eat their lunch” if they fail to offer perpetual futures. She highlighted that brokers cannot compete with retail crypto exchanges, especially as crypto derivatives cannot be offered to retail in the UK. However, brokers could still attract a substantial number of new clients without cannibalising their contracts for difference business. 

“I think we will launch another 10 real world asset perpetual futures,” she added. “That will be a trigger because gold alone is probably not enough for brokers to really get their teeth into the product.”

For example, LMAX’s new perpetual futures could include oil, other commodities and equity indices. 

“We are getting there,” she said. “We have been doing a ton of integrations with 15 bridge providers and we are starting to see traction.”

For example, in September this year LMAX announced its integration with Deltix to enable clients, such as high-frequency trading firms, to access and trade perpetual futures through institutional-grade connectivity and trading infrastructure. Brandon McCoy, account manager at Deltix, said in a statement that extending connectivity to perpetuals enables institutional clients to access deep liquidity with low-latency execution and the risk management capabilities they require. 

Prime brokers

Wright said some large clients who use Deltix may also want to use Ripple Prime, the prime broker owned by blockchain technology firm Ripple, which is integrated with LMAX. She said: “That is a great example of institutional attraction.”

Ripple Prime will be integrated into LMAX’s perpetual futures before the end of this year. In another advance for a digital asset prime brokerage model, Standard Chartered became one of the first global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) to demonstrate a bank-grade digital asset intermediation model in July this year. The bank executed pilot transactions on LMAX Digital for spot bitcoin and ether with T+1 settlement. Standard Chartered Prime Brokerage acted as the credit intermediary between counterparties, integrating LMAX Group’s execution and post trade environment with settlement completed through Standard Chartered’s digital asset custody platform.

Mercer said in a statement that the lack of credit counterparties with robust balance sheets has been a critical missing mechanism in the digital asset market. He added: “This demonstrates how bank-grade balance sheet strength and risk management can be combined with proven market infrastructure to enable scalable digital asset market access. This is a great example of the impending convergence of traditional finance and digital assets to a cross-asset capital markets future.”

There is another Tier One institution that will follow Standard Chartered’s example and this will be a “game changer” for integrating digital assets into the wider ecosystem, according to Wright. She added: “Institutions can use their existing prime broker relationships and just integrate digital assets, which we see as key.”

Wright said every bank now has four or five desks with a digital asset initiative such as repo, custody, trading or issuing bonds onchain.

Utility 

In addition to enabling the trading of digital assets, LMAX has also launched initiatives to increase their utility. For example, LMAX is expanding stablecoin support for 24/7 trading and to post collateral. Wright highlighted that the fees for minting and redeeming stablecoins have “shot through the roof” so the group is investigating a market that will reduce these fees, possibly by offsetting stablecoin positions between participants.

Kiosk, a wallet infrastructure that enables institutions to seamlessly accept, custody, allocate and deploy digital assets as cross-asset collateral was launched in May this year. The infrastructure allows clients to deposit digital assets directly into LMAX Custody and instantly use them as collateral across spot FX, precious metals, digital assets, CFDs and perpetual futures.

“Hyper-efficient collateral will be the foundation of modern, converged capital markets,” added Mercer. “Kiosk adds to our suite of products delivering greater access to trusted, institutional-grade solutions that bridge traditional and digital capital markets.”

Using the same tech stack as Kiosk, LMAX Group launched Omnia Exchange, an infrastructure layer enabling users to seamlessly convert any asset in real‑time via a single API, anywhere, anytime in February this year. Wright described Omnia Exchange as a single API that covers all LMAX liquidity. 

Omnia can triangulate the price for any asset in the LMAX ecosystem, which is attractive to firms such as payments firms, card providers and telcos. For example, a user may want the price of bitcoin versus Mexican peso, which LMAX does not typically offer as a paired trade. The API can triangulate the price from LMAX’s FX and bitcoin liquidity. 

“That is completely different from our day job of ultra-low latency trading, but it is opening up doors for us to think about how we enter the payments space,’ Wright added. “There is quite a big opportunity because we have liquidity.”

In addition, LMAX is building products on top of the custodian that the Group launched in 2018 to support treasury functions and tokenisation of real world assets.