During the 2022 Super Bowl, the trading site Crypto.com aired the most notorious TV commercial in the short history of the crypto industry. It featured Matt Damon strutting through famous moments in history before intoning, “Fortune favors the brave”—a stance widely mocked after crypto prices tanked calamitously soon after. It’s unclear if the actor’s reputation has fully recovered from the debacle—but Crypto.com appears to be doing better than ever.
In February, research site CoinGecko reported that Crypto.com’s trading volumes had grown 10x in 2024, vaulting it into the top tier of exchanges alongside the likes of Binance, OKX, and Coinbase. Meanwhile, the company recently doubled down on its lavish sports marketing strategy—which includes buying the naming rights to the L.A. Lakers’ home arena—by purchasing a major sponsorship with European soccer’s Champions League. Based in Singapore, and run by a Polish CEO whose ties to President Trump earned him an invite to a White House crypto summit last week, Crypto.com is expanding rapidly in the U.S.
Crypto.com’s growth, which has come primarily at the expense of more established competitors, is impressive. But not everyone is convinced the exchange’s impressive metrics are what they seem. A closer look at trading patterns on Crypto.com, as well as questions over the company’s relationship with market makers and an in-house trading team, suggests a more complicated story behind its rapid rise.
‘No secret to what we’ve done’
Crypto.com launched in Hong Kong in 2016 during an earlier crypto boom, but under the name Monaco Technologies. Two years later, in one of the shrewder deals in crypto history, the firm paid a reported $12 million to a cryptography professor at the University of Pennsylvania to obtain a domain synonymous with the fast-growing digital asset industry. Today, Crypto.com is splashed over everything from F1 cars to major golf tournaments to the aforementioned Lakers’ arena—the latter as part of a 20-year deal priced at $700 million.
Other crypto exchanges are indelibly associated with larger than life founders, such as Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong or Binance’s Changpeng Zhao (known to everyone in crypto as CZ). This is not the case with Crypto.com. CEO Kris Marszalek, a successful e-commerce entrepreneur, maintains such a low profile that he is unfamiliar even to many in the industry. The same is true of his cofounders, a Brazilian named Rafael Melo and two Chinese nationals, Gary Or and Bobby Bao.
Thanks to its name and sports marketing initiatives, though, Crypto.com has become a familiar brand. But it has never been a major player in the trading scene. That began to change last year when third party analytics sites began to report Crypto.com’s trading volumes surging relative to other exchanges. Earlier this year, CoinGecko reported that the site had leapt from the 13th most popular centralized exchange at the start of 2024 to third place overall by the end of the year:
What was the fastest-growing CEX of 2024? 🔍
Our latest study revealed that @cryptocom was the fastest-growing CEX, with its trading volume growing by 969.7% in 2024, followed by @Bybit_Official (397.8%) and @gate_io (241.5%).
Read the full study: https://t.co/VdCzODMMWe pic.twitter.com/zOqo3VanQU— CoinGecko (@coingecko) February 14, 2025
Crypto.com’s surge, which began last summer, has left some industry watchers perplexed. An executive at a long-established competing exchange, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the upstart’s name rarely comes up in conversation with big institutional clients. The exec added that it was hard to identify an obvious cause for Crypto.com’s sudden growth, especially since it was not directly involved in the wave of new Bitcoin ETFs—a category of fund that launched in the U.S. last January, resulting in billions of dollars flowing into the crypto industry.
Crypto.com spokesman George Tucker, though, told Fortune there is no mystery. Rather, the company views its sudden ascendance into the top tier of crypto exchanges as the result of popular new trading products and a sound strategy. Tucker touted the site’s deep liquidity, attractive dashboards, and “white glove service” for VIP customers.
“There’s no secret behind what we’ve done. We’ve dedicated time to building a really good institutional platform that has attracted some of the best traders,” he said.
Tucker also pointed to Crypto.com’s recent relaunch of a service for institutional customers in the U.S., which it had suspended in 2023 owing to a lack of demand. Data from the blockchain analytics firm Kaiko supports the case that the Singapore-based company’s new institutional service has helped it leapfrog longtime U.S. incumbents:
According to Tucker, this U.S. growth came in part because the company has a spate of state-level money transmitting licenses. He added the site’s popularity has also been boosted by partnerships with Visa and Mastercard that allows consumers to spend crypto with a debit card, and by its high visibility at popular sporting events. Crypto.com views all of this as a “Crypto in every wallet” strategy that will accelerate as it builds out ties with a wide range of merchants.
Certainly crypto is a fast-moving and fluid industry where upstarts regularly swoop in to become major players. The most famous example of this may be Binance, which launched in mid-2017 and within a year became the world’s biggest crypto exchange. Is the rise of Crypto.com just the latest example of this familiar story? Or something else?
‘It’s confusing’
The crypto industry is notable for offering enormous transparency—thanks to the tamperproof trail of blockchain ledgers—and a striking lack of it when it comes to the internal operations of major players. When it comes to reporting on the volume and nature of trades, it is partly a guessing game, says CoinGecko’s head of research, Zhong Yang Chang.
Chang explained that he found Crypto.com’s sudden rise to be “quite surprising” and noted that measuring trade volumes on exchanges has become more difficult in recent years owing to the rise of trading by big institutions, which use tactics that obscure their trades. In reporting on exchange volumes, CoinGecko also includes a so-called trust score out of 10 that takes into account a variety of factors like security and transparency. While 10 exchanges receive a perfect score, Crypto.com is part of a second tier that scores 9/10.
Chang did not provide specifics as to why Crypto.com had been docked a point, but one reason may lie with unusual trading patterns. According to slides captured from the site TradingView and whose authenticity was independently verified by Fortune, the flow of trade swaps between two major cryptocurrencies, Ethereum and Tether, occurred at oddly regular intervals.
In the ordinary course of things, trading in crypto—or other assets—takes place in a series of spikes and troughs that coincide with price movements. A jump or fall in the price of, say, Bitcoin will lead to a flurry of activity by traders and bots that then subsides when the price stabilizes. Unusually, the TradingView slides show trades at Crypto.com taking place at a fairly steady pace—even while, at other exchanges over the same period of time, the pattern reflected the customary bursts and ebbs.
“It’s confusing,” says Adam McCarthy, a research analyst at Kaiko.
Market making and prop trading
The practice of “wash trading,” which describes one party taking both sides of a trade, is generally treated as illegal but has long been pervasive in the crypto world. The tactic is typically used by new cryptocurrency projects to inflate their trading volume, but has also been used by exchanges—including by Binance, which admitted in a 2023 settlement with the Department of Justice that its U.S. affiliate had engaged in wash trading years ago.
According to McCarthy, the research analyst, it’s possible that wash trading contributed to Crypto.com’s recent surge in volume, but he says other explanations are more likely. He posited that some of the volume came from the exchange having a prop desk, or in-house trading team. McCarthy pointed to recent job ads describing such a team, one of which Fortune independently located on LinkedIn. As seen in the screenshot below, it describes developing and implementing trading strategies:
While investment banks like Goldman Sachs have long had in-house traders, it is unusual for an exchange—crypto or otherwise—to have one since it risks creating a conflict of interest.
“Why be active if you’re just going to be front run by an internal trading team?” asked McCarthy rhetorically, describing a scenario where an in-house team sees impending customer trades and places trades of their own first.
McCarthy added that the existence of Crypto.com’s internal trading team does not necessarily imply anything nefarious, and the team’s purpose may simply be to trade with customers, ensuring they have a smooth experience on the platform.
Tucker, the Crypto.com spokesman, said no conflict of interest exists, stating: “Our internal quant team is focused on building innovative solutions to improve our platform’s performance, pricing models, and risk management tools as part of our broader risk team effort. These teams are critical to ensuring we remain competitive and offer the best trading experience possible to our users, while adhering to strict separation rules.”
Finally, there is one more potential contributor to Crypto.com’s surprising gains: market makers. These are outfits—common at both crypto and traditional stock exchanges—that make a business out of stockpiling assets in order to profit from supplying liquidity to the market. Both McCarthy and executives at two competing crypto exchanges, who were not authorized to speak on the record, told Fortune a good portion of Crypto.com’s trading volumes likely comes from market makers.
If this is the case, it is notable, since two of the industry’s largest market makers, Jump Trading and Jane Street, exited the business in 2023 amid regulatory scrutiny—raising the question of which entities are providing services to Crypto.com instead. Fortune repeatedly asked financial giant DRW, whose subsidiary Cumberland does crypto market making, if it provides services to Crypto.com, but did not receive a reply.
In response to a question about its market making arrangements, Tucker stated: “I’m afraid we can’t divulge the names of our market makers as they’re protected by confidentiality agreements.”
The upshot of all this is that Crypto.com has found a way to push into the top tier of exchanges, and spend lavishly to promote its brand, but that it is also hard to tell with certainty how it is accomplishing this feat. The company, for its part, suggested there is nothing to question.
“Questions over our success are inevitable given the fact that our competitors were caught flat-footed as we continued building and innovating what is now the leading global exchange of U.S. pairs,” said Tucker.