Ex-Goldman and Paribas executives launch Crypto Facilities

Timo Schlaefer, a former executive director at Goldman Sachs in London and Jean-Christophe Laruelle, who formerly built trading platform systems for BNP Paribas and Societe Generale, co-founded Crypto Facilities, a new bitcoin derivatives trading platform. The platform is based in London and at present customers can trade only a forward contract on the bitcoin price.

Crypto Facilities is just one of the many newly launched UK exchanges that are trying to get a place under a regulatory system, although the regulatory establishment is itself not stable.

For Schlaefer, the platform is just the first step of what he expects will be a long involvement in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

"Bitcoin is a special realisation of the blockchain technology ... Whatever the new use of the blockchain technology will be, it's probably going to be some crypto asset, some sort of virtual asset. If you have a framework for how to trade this asset, how to hedge risk and so forth, I think that's quite valuable", he said.