High-speed telecommunications provider Perseus Telecom and digital currency trading platform Atlas ATS formally launched Wednesday a globally integrated bitcoin exchange system in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore to facilitate trading in the digital currency by high-frequency trading firms and other large financial institutions.

The two firms’ collaboration, first reported last month by The Wall Street Journal, marks a milestone in the evolution of bitcoin out of a retail-oriented, loosely regulated low-tech environment to one that is open to the high-volume and strictly regulated activities of Wall Street. It comes after the sudden collapse of Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which said it had lost 850,000 bitcoin—now worth more than $500 million—and a string of scandals, including a world-wide hacking attack that temporarily paralyzed Mt. Gox competitors such as Slovenia-based Bitstamp.

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“Now, institutional investors and banks can see that there are known players with the right pedigree” engaged in bitcoin, said Jock Percy, chief executive officer of Perseus, whose high-bandwidth lines are used to connect securities exchanges around the world with institutional investors’ trade execution platforms. He said Perseus’s high-speed trading clients had expressed demand for such services, but needed assurances that such systems are compliant with their industry’s demanding regulatory requirements, and that the systems use fast-response technology that can meet their risk-limit requirements in high volume.

None of that is currently available for bitcoin trading, Percy said. Whereas most bitcoin exchanges reside on cloud-based servers that he says are “inherently glitchy,” Atlas ATS’s platform will be located within a robust, dedicated network, Percy added.

Atlas ATS CEO Shawn Sloves said the exchange integration across multiple locations will add liquidity to the trading pool for bitcoin by creating a single, global order book that gets around what he calls a “regionally focused, very fragmented” bitcoin trading environment that is “not considered Wall Street grade.” The network will incorporate both a private market, where bids and offers among members of a pool are kept outside the public domain, and a public market that broadcasts live, real-time prices, he said.

Read the rest of this story at WSJ.com.

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