Gemini announced on April 25 that it will deploy Nasdaq SMARTS market surveillance technology across its platform. The move aims to strengthen trading oversight and build what the exchange calls a \"ru
Gemini announced on April 25 that it will deploy Nasdaq SMARTS market surveillance technology across its platform. The move aims to strengthen trading oversight and build what the exchange calls a "rules-based marketplace."
SMARTS provides monitoring tools that track complex market data and flag potential manipulation and malpractice. Gemini's surveillance team will deploy it to watch all trading pairs, including the Gemini Auctions, which determine the settlement price for Cboe bitcoin futures that went live in late 2017.
The vendor describes the system as having "proven at over 50 marketplaces and regulators" and calls it "the industry benchmark for real-time and T1 solutions for market surveillance, supervision and compliance."
Regulators in multiple jurisdictions are scrutinizing the crypto market. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently asked major exchanges for information about their operations. Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss welcomed the request. "We continue to embrace thoughtful regulation and collaboration on our mission to help build the future of money," Winklevoss told the New York Post. Kraken CEO Jesse Howell took a different path, stating his exchange would not comply with the information request.
Gemini intends to "become a market leader in custom surveillance rule creation and alerting for the crypto-asset market," according to its announcement. The exchange's strategy diverges from Kraken's resistance.
That calculation may reflect lessons from the Winklevoss twins' failed Bitcoin ETF application. Regulators rejected it partly because they saw the underlying crypto market as vulnerable to manipulation and suffering from insufficient transparency. By implementing surveillance systems now, Gemini appears to be addressing those specific concerns.
