Joseph Tuccio has joined Spotex as head of digital assets, the US institutional trading venue said today (Thursday). He arrives from Seabury Capital, a long-time Spotex investor, where he ran digital partnerships and helped line up much of the crypto network the venue is now building on.

The move formalizes a relationship that was already doing work behind the scenes. Spotex said many of its recent tie-ups with crypto liquidity providers and custodians came through Tuccio's contacts before he took a full-time seat.

Founded in 2010, Spotex runs an electronic communications network for foreign exchange and precious metals.

An Investor's Executive Moves Into the Operating Seat

Tuccio has spent close to half of a roughly 20-year markets career in institutional digital assets, according to Spotex. He held business development roles at Elysium Technology Group and Bosonic, and served as global head of digital asset management at Nukkleus, which the company says he helped scale before its 2020 sale.

Earlier, he worked in institutional FX at ED&F Man, FIXI Americas and FC Stone, now StoneX. His hire follows other Spotex build-outs on the sales side, including the earlier appointment of Kevin Gillespie to lead eurozone FX sales.

The venue is run by John Miesner, who was promoted to chief executive from the sales side. Miesner said the firm would "bring the same execution standards ... that have defined our FX business" to crypto clients.

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Tuccio added "FX clients are increasingly looking at expanding to digital assets," and framed the offer as a single venue and API spanning FX, metals and crypto.

Spotex has run its FX ECN since 2014 and previously routed it to clients through institutional firms including INTL FCStone. It now wants that same reach on the crypto side.

Spotex Enters a Field Built by Crypto Natives

The institutional digital-asset venue Spotex is targeting is already occupied. Wintermute, one of the market makers Spotex has signed, has pushed 350-plus crypto pairs into traditional finance through connectivity deals. B2C2, another named partner, has built institutional crypto liquidity around the same buy-side demand.

On the settlement side, custodians such as Anchorage Digital have been wiring into institutional venues for years, including as the custodian chosen by EDX's clearinghouse. Spotex's pitch is different in origin: it is an FX operator bolting crypto onto an existing execution stack, rather than a crypto-native firm reaching toward institutions.