STS Digital is expanding its institutional trading platform to include tokenised equities, commodities and foreign exchange. The aim is to allow clients to trade and use the assets as collateral alongside cryptocurrency in a single account.

The Bermuda Monetary Authority-regulated firm said the service includes spot trading, over-the-counter options, structured products and quantitative investments across digital assets and tokens.

Clients will be able to trade tokenised major American index exchange-traded funds, large-cap equities, gold, oil and foreign exchange around the clock. The firm said positions can be cross-margined under the credit and collateral arrangements clients already have.

Maxime Seiler, STS Digital’s cofounder and chief executive, said tokenisation could make moving assets between financial counterparties much easier.

“In traditional markets, a share or a bar of gold sits in a custody account, and moving it between brokers takes days,” he said. “Tokenised, the same asset moves like a stablecoin: instantly, in any size, around the clock. That makes it collateral.”

The announcement builds on STS’s earlier move to accept a tokenised sovereign bond as collateral. In August, the company said clients could trade with USDM1, an on-chain United States dollar bond issued by the Republic of the Marshall Islands and backed by US Treasury securities.

The new service extends that approach to tokenised gold and equity ETFs, which STS said can now be posted against crypto-options positions in the same account.

STS acts as the principal counterparty to client trades, rather than as just a venue matching buyers and sellers. The company said it would manage and hedge client flow in a risk framework that includes instrument limits, continuous monitoring and independent oversight.

Every tokenised asset listed by STS will be subject to internal due diligence on matters including the issuer, backing and redemption arrangements, reserves, custody and liquidity, the company said.

The expansion follows STS’s introduction of cross-asset portfolio margining after completing the BMA’s material-change process, as well as its September launch of quantitative investment strategies. Its first such strategy, Smart Bitcoin, adjusts bitcoin exposure according to a predetermined volatility target.

STS received its full Class F licence under Bermuda’s Digital Asset Business Act in May, completing the regulator’s three-stage licensing process. The firm provides access to more than 400 digital assets through its trading desk, client portal and application programming interface.

Michael Arrington of Arrington Capital, an investor and client of STS, said the expansion brought “multiple asset classes, sophisticated derivatives, and cross-margining together through a single principal counterparty”.