With rising investor interest, digital assets are making their way into traditional financial markets. Most recently, Republic Protocol and Wyre formed a partnership to provide liquidity for the world’s first decentralized dark pool.

Digital Meets Traditional Markets

According to the press release, global money transmitter Wyre will provide Republic Protocol with deeper liquidity and other key services for the RenEx decentralized dark pool.

RenEx is Republic Protocol’s first verifiable, decentralized dark pool capable of supporting the placement and execution of large volume digital asset orders.

A dark pool is a type of alternative trading system regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and used by institutional investors to trade large blocks of shares on a hidden order book not available for public view.

Through the partnership, Republic Protocol will leverage Wyre’s global payment infrastructure, which enables businesses to transfer cross-border payments more efficiently than banks.

In the official press release, Taiyang Zhang, CEO of Republic Protocol, said:

“Working together, Republic Protocol and Wyre will serve as a powerful new nexus between digital asset markets and the traditional financial infrastructure. Both our companies are focused on facilitating the entry of traditional institutional investors and funds to provide the increased liquidity digital asset markets need to grow and flourish.”

Wyre will also provide know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) services for the RenEx platform to ensure compliance with the SEC. Third-party dark pools built on the Republic Protocol platform will be able to integrate these KYC/AML systems into their own exchange offerings as well.

Users of the RenEx platform will have access to Wyre’s existing OTC offerings, which have traded $3.5 billion in digital assets and over $750 million in bank-to-bank commercial payments to date.

Adding to the statement, Louis Aboud-Hogben, head of research at Wyre, stated:

“This partnership is a significant step toward solving the two most significant challenges faced by decentralized asset exchanges today, being compliance and liquidity. Traditional institutions, be they investment funds or trading desks, are currently eager but unable to participate in decentralized markets, as they must know who their counterparties are for compliance purposes, and they need sufficient liquidity to trade. This partnership will enable institutional participation in decentralized, cross-chain trading within a dark pool, and we couldn’t be more excited.”

Republic Protocol plans to launch the first version of RenEx later this month.