Inside Interchange: Building the Future of Digital Asset Settlement

Interchange is Zodia Custody’s institutional settlement network, connecting clients to trading venues, prime brokers, and liquidity providers, without requiring them to move assets out of custody to do it. It’s a simple idea with significant implications for how institutions manage risk in digital asset markets.

We sat down with Chief Product Officer Anoosh Arevshatian and Head of Interchange Product Wing Cheah to find out how it works, and where it’s going.

Note: Interchange is currently made available by Zodia Custody Limited (“ZCL”) in the United Kingdom and is intended only for institutional, professional or otherwise eligible clients who meet Zodia’s onboarding, jurisdictional and product eligibility requirements. Availability of Interchange, connected venues, collateral arrangements and supported assets is subject to applicable laws and regulations, client classification, Zodia’s internal approvals, venue onboarding requirements and the relevant contractual documentation. This material is provided for general information only.

Let’s start at the beginning. Where did the idea for Interchange come from?

Anoosh: Honestly? Friction… and a bit of disbelief.

For a long time, the industry just accepted a model where, if you wanted to trade, you had to move your assets away from safe custody to do it. From a risk perspective, that never made sense to me. You’re effectively telling institutions that participating in the market means taking on avoidable exposure. That’s not how institutional markets are supposed to work.

Then we saw a series of events that forced everyone to confront that reality. Not because venues are inherently bad actors – far from it – but because the structure itself introduced risk that didn’t need to be there.

So, Interchange came from a very deliberate position: why are we asking institutions to choose between access and control? Why not design a system where they don’t have to? That’s what we set out to build.

Anoosh, you previously led risk at Zodia Custody. If I’m a Head of Risk or Compliance at an asset manager, how should I think about Interchange?

Anoosh: Think of it as fixing a market structure problem, not just a product feature.

The traditional crypto trading model introduced a set of risks that institutions would never accept elsewhere. Take pre-funding: the idea that you need to deposit assets at a venue before you can trade is, fundamentally, a credit decision. You’re taking exposure to that entity, trusting their controls, and hoping nothing goes wrong. Interchange removes that assumption entirely. Your assets stay in custody. They don’t move until the point of settlement. Full stop.

Then there’s co-mingling and opacity. If you can’t clearly evidence where your assets sit, who owns them, and how they’re protected, that’s a problem. With Interchange, assets are segregated, so ownership is clear, and balances are verifiable. That shouldn’t be a differentiator in 2026, but in this market, it still is.

Settlement risk is another one. A lot of crypto settlement still relies on sequencing and goodwill: “you send first, then I’ll send”. That’s not infrastructure, that’s coordination. We replace it with delivery-versus-payment logic, where both sides commit, rules are enforced, and outcomes are deterministic.

And then governance, which is the one that really matters. Most solutions are built technically first, with governance bolted on later. We did the opposite. Interchange is governed by a formal rulebook: standardised, enforceable, and applied consistently across all participants. That’s what gives institutions the confidence to use it at scale.

If you’re in risk or compliance, you’re not trying to eliminate risk (you know that’s impossible!), you’re trying to control and understand it. Interchange doesn’t pretend risk disappears. It makes it visible, structured, and significantly reduced where it doesn’t need to exist.

How would you describe Interchange today?

Wing: At a practical level, Interchange is a settlement network that actually works the way institutions need it to. It connects custody with trading venues and counterparties but crucially, it does that without forcing clients to compromise on how their assets are held.

What’s changed over time is how much of the process we’ve taken on and simplified. Settlement is now automated, rules-based, and fully integrated into the custody workflow. So instead of clients coordinating across multiple systems and teams, they can rely on a process that’s predictable and repeatable. That might sound like a small thing, but operationally, it’s enormous.

Let’s talk about your venue network. Who are you connected to today and why does it matter?

Wing: It matters because different strategies need different types of liquidity, and we’re very intentional about the venues we connect to. It’s not about volume for the sake of it; it’s about giving clients the right tools for the job.

BitMEX is one of the original crypto derivatives exchanges and still a reference point for perpetuals. For clients running derivatives-focused strategies or more specialised trading setups, that’s exactly the liquidity they’re looking for.

Deribit is the go-to venue for options – deep liquidity, strong price discovery, and a very mature derivatives market. If you’re trading BTC or ETH options or volatility strategies, it’s a completely different use case from spot or perps.

Bybit brings significant global scale, high liquidity, and a broad product set across spot and derivatives. A lot of clients come to it for execution efficiency and flexibility.

The key thing is, clients don’t have to pick one. They can connect to multiple venues, allocate capital across them, and optimise execution, all while keeping their assets in custody.

And beyond exchanges, how broad is the network becoming?

Wing: We’re expanding beyond exchanges because clients are doing more than just trading. Alongside exchanges, we connect to LMAX Digital for institutional spot liquidity, Hidden Road for prime brokerage and credit, and Bitfinex for deep liquidity and financing markets.

Each supports a different workflow, and that’s really the direction we’re heading in – building around real-world use cases, not just connectivity for connectivity’s sake.

Anoosh, how do you think about that broader ecosystem?

Anoosh: If we’re being honest, the industry has been quite narrow in how it thinks about “access”. Access to what? For a long time, the answer was just: exchanges. But institutional finance doesn’t work like that. It’s an ecosystem, involving trading venues, lenders, brokers, structured product providers. If digital assets want to mature, they need to start looking more like that.

Interchange is built with that in mind. The question isn’t just “how do I trade?”. It’s “how do I deploy capital across multiple counterparties, safely and efficiently?”. That’s a much more interesting question, and a much bigger opportunity.

Looking ahead, what does the future of Interchange look like?

Wing: From a product perspective, it’s about expanding what clients can actually do with their assets, not just how they settle trades. We’re already seeing demand for more flexible collateral arrangements, more counterparties, and more integrated workflows.

So the focus is on expanding the asset set, growing the partner network, and keeping all of it simple to use. Simplicity doesn’t get enough credit. It’s genuinely hard to build something powerful that doesn’t feel complicated.

And strategically, where does this go?

Anoosh: This is where it gets interesting. Right now, most people still think about digital assets in silos – trading here, collateral there, yield somewhere else. That’s inefficient.

The future is capital working harder, in one place. We’re already starting to see this with tokenised assets; the ability to hold tokenised funds in custody and use them as collateral for trading, for example. That changes the equation entirely. Instead of asking “what do I trade with?”, you start asking “how do I optimise all of my capital, across all of my strategies?”. That’s a very different mindset, and once you’re thinking that way, the possibilities get a lot more interesting.

Final question. What excites you most about where this is heading?

Wing: For me, it’s the collateral piece, and how much bigger it’s about to get. We’re already there in some ways: clients can hold RWAs like PAXG, tokenised gold, as collateral to trade on Deribit. That’s not a roadmap item – that’s live today. But it’s just the start. From here, it’s about expanding the universe: more asset types, more prime brokers, more counterparties. A future where Interchange stops being a settlement network and starts being the connective tissue of how institutions deploy capital in digital assets.

Anoosh: For me, it’s raising the bar. The industry doesn’t need more complexity – it needs better standards. If we can make custody non-negotiable, governance consistent, and settlement efficient, then institutions don’t have to “adapt” to digital assets anymore. The market adapts to them. That’s the shift I’m here for.

Interchange connects custody, liquidity, and trust, giving institutions a better and safer way to deploy capital in digital assets.

Find out more about Interchange and register your interest today.