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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.