Last year was a tough time to run a crypto venue. Spot activity was subdued for much of the year and on a single weekend in October about $19 billion of leveraged positions were liquidated. LMAX Group came through on the strength of a model its rivals do not have: it runs a regulated institutional FX exchange and a regulated digital asset exchange on the same technology, under the same governance, for many of the same clients.
The numbers reflect that. Group average daily volume rose 30% year-on-year to around $40 billion. LMAX served more than 1,000 active institutional clients, including 60 banks, and added around 150 new ones during the year. About half of its institutional clients traded digital assets during the review period. The proportion trading both FX and digital assets rose from 22% to around 30%. Digital asset average daily volume held at around $510 million a day in a difficult market.
“Everyone talks about the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance,” says Chris Knight, managing director of LMAX Digital. “A lot of people put that ambition on their website. We truly live and breathe it.”
That convergence is why institutions come. Through its FX business, LMAX already works with at least the top 40 banks globally and more than 100 asset managers and corporates. When those firms turn to digital assets, they find a venue they already know. It is a central limit order book with firm, anonymous liquidity and strict price-time priority. There is no last look and LMAX takes no principal risk against client flow.
“We don’t have a different support system and technology for digital assets as we do for FX,” says Knight. “It’s the same bulletproof technology we’ve always been known for.”
That technology improved substantially in 2025. LMAX increased matching engine throughput by 80%, to 800,000 orders a second at peak and 240,000 sustained, 1.4m/second at peak, alongside about 700,000 risk calculations a second. Average internal latency stayed below 40 microseconds across matching engines in London, New York, Tokyo and Singapore. All the infrastructure is built in-house, with around 53% of the firm’s 335 staff working in engineering and technology.
Everyone talks about the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance. A lot of people put that ambition on their website. We truly live and breathe it
Chris Knight
On October 10, 2025, that infrastructure was put to the test. A US tariff announcement triggered the largest liquidation event in crypto’s history. LMAX kept 100% uptime. Over the weekend that followed, with traditional markets closed, it traded more than $2 billion on LMAX Digital. The cryptocurrency exchange has run 24/7 since launching in 2018 and the firm also offers weekend FX priced off its digital markets.
LMAX also widened what institutions can do on the venue. In September 2025, it launched US dollar-settled perpetual futures on Bitcoin and Ether. These give clients a regulated way to manage exposure across spot and derivatives. Institutional best execution depends on transaction cost analysis, and LMAX supports that process with three key capabilities: real-time market data via FIX and ultra-low-latency ITCH feeds, more than 10 years of full order book history, and independent execution analytics through FairXchange.
Its regulatory footprint spans multiple jurisdictions, with oversight from the UK’s FCA, Singapore’s MAS, Gibraltar’s GFSC, Cyprus’s CySEC and New Zealand’s FMA. That brings digital asset trading under the standards banks and asset managers apply everywhere else. LMAX also argues for separating execution from custody, one of the clearest lessons traditional finance has to offer crypto.
The groundwork laid in 2025 is now reaching the market. In February 2026, LMAX launched Omnia Exchange, enabling institutions to transfer value seamlessly across fiat, crypto, stablecoins and any digital asset through a single, unified API, on LMAX’s wholesale pricing. In July, Standard Chartered executed its first digital asset prime brokerage trades on LMAX Digital. It was one of the first global systemically important banks to do so, bringing bank credit intermediation to institutional crypto trading.
“But we’re a legitimate, respected FX exchange and a legitimate, respected digital exchange,” points out Knight. “There’s no one else in that camp.”
The world’s best digital assets trading venue should be one that institutions can rely on when markets break, and one that makes digital assets trade like any other asset class. In 2025, crypto volumes stalled and pure-play venues retrenched. LMAX still grew its client base, upgraded its infrastructure and held firm through the most violent weekend crypto has seen. It also laid the foundations for a single cross-asset market. That is why LMAX Group is the world’s best digital assets trading platform.
