Welcome to another episode of Chat With Traders. Today’s guest is Benjamin Small who has an electrical engineering PhD. Since 2006, he’s been employed in quantitative research roles at, Citadel, Credit Suisse, UBS, and IEX (the stock exchange).
Currently, he is at Gemini as the head of market structure. It’s based in New York and is the world’s first fully licensed and regulated Bitcoin exchange.
We chat about many things including payment for order flow, why people want to normalize Bitcoin, how high frequency market makers treat retail orders, potential outcomes for Bitcoin, becoming a cashless society and the cryptocurrency system.
Even though Gemini have sponsored several episodes of this podcast, this is not one of them. In other words, I was not paid to do this interview. I wanted Ben to come on the podcast because he has a lot of experience and it would be cool to learn about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
As always, I hope you enjoy this interview. Let’s dive in!
What’s Covered in This Interview:
- How high frequency market makers treat retail orders, what does routing to an exchange or internalizing an order mean, and payment for order flow.
- How Gemini is impacting the Bitcoin ecosystem, including why regulation matters and why it’s beneficial to attract more institutional flow.
- Benjamin shares security measures needed to protect Bitcoin and the types of trading you can do with Bitcoin
- Ben’s views on altcoins (Bitcoin alternatives), including whether or not Bitcoin will still be the leader and how altcoins can help the cryptocurrency system.
- The future of Bitcoin: Will be as widely accepted as other currencies? Will it turn us into a cashless society?
Links and Resources:
- EP 075: Dan Aisen, IEX
- First-Ever Daily Bitcoin Auctions – Check out this blog post from Gemini
- Discretionary Peg Order Type – Check out this self explanatory video
- Benjamin Small – Connect with him on LinkedIn
- Gemini.com
