As mainstream interest around crypto grows, a new exchange is vying to compete against the likes of Coinbase and Robinhood. Armed with $11 million in fresh funding, True Markets is launching a trading app this week targeted at retail customers, which will allow users to buy and sell tokens based on the popular Solana blockchain, and soon other top cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Cofounders Vishal Gupta and Patrick McCreary are veterans of Goldman Sachs and Coinbase, where they helped launch global trading products. Now, as the landscape of crypto exchanges gets increasingly crowded, Gupta told Fortune that True Markets is poised to capture the flood of new blockchain users through the platform’s combination of speed, costs, and design.
“What we see here is that the retail crypto user in the United States has largely been underserved,” Gupta said. “The reality is, our team has been building foundational stuff in crypto for a long time.”
The crypto evolution
After a career in traditional finance, Gupta served in leadership roles at pioneering crypto exchanges before setting out on his own with True Markets, which he launched out of stealth last fall with $9 million in seed funding from crypto-focused investors, including Reciprocal Ventures.
Learning from the lessons of past failures like FTX, the crypto exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried that collapsed in spectacular fashion in late 2022, Gupta designed True Markets’ underlying exchange, TrueX, to separate core trading functions. That included relying on the blockchain infrastructure firm Paxos to serve as custodian, rather than holding on to users’ assets itself.
TrueX, which operates as a centralized matching engine mainly for institutional users, recently launched live trading for clients, focused on spot trading of what Gupta described as “head and torso” assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. The True Markets app, launching this week, reflects the next major step for the platform.
Similar to TrueX, the True Markets app will be noncustodial, meaning it does not hold crypto assets on behalf of its users. Instead, it will rely on infrastructure provider Turnkey to support hosted wallets. But unlike TrueX, the app will be focused on retail customers. It is built on top of the Solana blockchain and supports Solana-based tokens, which have grown in popularity thanks to the ongoing memecoin boom. Gupta says that True Markets will whitelist new tokens available for trading every week, while including warnings about potential risks, such as ownership concentration. “This is really us thinking that an exchange should be more of a gateway, not a gatekeeper,” Gupta told Fortune.
While the True Markets app will be initially built around Solana, Gupta said they plan to launch more cryptocurrencies throughout the summer, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, before potentially expanding into other forms of tokenized assets.
A crowded market
Though a new crypto exchange seems to enter the U.S. market every day, Gupta argued that usage in the U.S. is still mostly constrained to a few options, with Coinbase still the runaway favorite. For users, however, that lack of true competition means high fees and slow processing times.
Gupta said that the goal of True Markets is to target both crypto veterans and users coming into the space for the first time. Despite the glut of options, Gupta said that his and McCreary’s deep backgrounds in both traditional finance and crypto trading meant they could rebuild the exchange experience from the ground up, including offering a noncustodial solution. “The reality is that 15 people can probably run a crypto exchange really well,” he told Fortune. “They’re all either billionaires or in jail now, and the other two are me and my cofounder.”
Top investors have bought into Gupta’s vision, with the company’s new Series A round backed by PayPal Ventures, Variant, and existing investors including RRE Ventures and Reciprocal Ventures. The company currently has 10 full-time employees.
While Gupta acknowledged that he can’t compete on marketing with other crypto exchanges, which often shell out for extravagant sponsorships of sports teams and arenas, he said that True Markets’ goal is to be the best option for users by the end of the summer on a price, speed, and experience level. That includes better displays and data, such as so-called “sparklines,” or visualizations of market momentum and price behavior.
“There is room for competition,” Gupta said. “Our goal is not necessarily to be the biggest exchange, but to be the best infrastructure, the best team, and the best platform out there.”
