The firm's July 30 report shows OTC-desk routing dominated institutional flow at 77.7%, far ahead of the 18.4% sent to public exchanges.
Crypto dark pools gained a meaningful share of trading on sFOX, rising from negligible volume in April to 15% of monthly volume by June, while May alone generated $147 million in dark-pool activity. The firm's July 30 report also shows institutions routed most volume through OTC desks at 77.7% of platform flow, compared with 18.4% executed on public exchanges. Diana Pires described the shift as a structural change similar to transformations seen earlier in equity and foreign-exchange markets, as large traders seek to reduce market impact, avoid signaling their intentions on public order books and use brokers and aggregators to source liquidity across multiple venues. The trend may narrow spreads and improve execution for large orders, but it also weakens the ability of retail traders to infer institutional positioning from exchange books and simple cross-venue arbitrage.