Bybit partners with Riskbloq to integrate crypto trading for users

Bybit, the global cryptocurrency exchange has partnered with Riskbloq, a South African based blockchain analytics firm. This partnership will see an integration of the exchange on the Riskbloq platform to allow users to trade and invest in digital assets directly.

The details 

• Riskbloq uses on- and off-chain sources to provide risk profiles for more than 15,000 digital assets for investors.
• In addition, through its platform, investors looking to trade crypto derivatives can keep up with the risk posture of assets and make informed investment decisions.

Be smart: Crypto derivatives are products or contracts whose values are determined by underlying crypto assets. These could be in crypto futures, options, or perpetual contracts.

• Riskbloq’s partnership with Bybit will allow investors to track risk changes in their investment portfolios and access the liquidity to trade their assets on one platform.
• Riskbloq’s CEO, Nzwisisa Chidembo, told Mariblock that the partnership responds to investors’ desire to transact once they discover a promising asset using Riskbloq’s analytics platform.
• While users can now buy and sell cryptocurrencies on Riskbloq, the company is not pivoting into exchange services at the moment. However, Chidembo did not entirely rule out the possibility of a pivot in the future.

Key quotes

• In an interview with Mariblock, Chidembo outlined the reason behind the partnership. He said:

“We started this journey of trying to discover who we can potentially partner with to assist our investors complete that last stage of their journey, and so we partnered up with Bybit to allow our users basically… find the liquidity that they actually need to execute on a specific trade.”

• On whether the partnership meant Riskbloq was pivoting into exchange services, he said:

“I don't think it's necessarily a big pivot at this point in time. I think it's a hypothesis that we had all along that we would need to assist our users to just transact once they have gotten the risk position of a specific digital asset.”

Dive deeper

• Chidembo noted that more hedge fund and investment managers with mostly traditional finance backgrounds are looking at building investment portfolios in digital assets, especially following regulatory clarity in South Africa.
• He said:

“They [investment managers] are building a knowledge base of how they would have exposure from a fund perspective by more so learning from a personal exposure perspective.

“They are more so, I would say, in the learning phase simply because most of them were still quite hesitant because of the lack of regulation here in South Africa. But since that has changed, their tone has also changed a bit. Now, it is more so just about timing instead of regulation being the biggest hindrance.”

• Late last year, the South African Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) in South Africa declared crypto as a financial product, a move that marked a new phase for crypto regulations in the country.
• In August, the FSCA mandated all crypto exchanges in the country to get government-issued licenses before the end of the year.
• Riskbloq’s interactions with its users have shown that institutional investment funds are particularly picking up more interest in real-world assets tokenization, Chidembo affirmed.

“There is also a big interest when it comes to tokenization of real-world assets. We are currently running experiments where we are providing risk profiles for real-world assets that have more so found a home within the web three space via tokenization.”