XBTO becomes Algorand's market maker, moves USDC treasury onto the network

2026-08-19

market · market-making · liquidity · institutional · stablecoin · partnership · discovery · web · updated

XBTO becomes Algorand's market maker, moves USDC treasury onto the network

A Market Maker for ALGO — and a Treasury on the Network

On August 27, 2025, the Algorand Foundation handed one of the most consequential roles in a token's market life to XBTO: continuously quoting ALGO's order books on global exchanges so that buyers and sellers always have a counterparty. A market maker exists precisely for that job — placing persistent buy and sell orders keeps spreads tight and stops large trades from moving prices against the person placing them, which is the difference between a market institutions will touch and one they won't. What made this appointment distinctive was the second half of the arrangement: XBTO also committed to moving USDC between its custody wallets and exchanges over Algorand itself, as part of its treasury and rebalancing operations. The Foundation's own announcement framed the pairing as one agreement with two fronts — market making for ALGO, and Algorand serving as a settlement rail for a market maker's own [stablecoin](/glossary/stablecoin "A cryptocurrency whose value is designed to stay stable, usually by being pegged 1:1 to a traditional currency like the US dollar (e.g. USDC) or, in H") flows.

Who XBTO Is

XBTO began in 2015 as a proprietary trading firm in New York, moved its headquarters to Bermuda in 2019, and became the second crypto firm licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority. It now holds a Class F BMA licence — the category that classifies it as a digital-asset market maker — plus a 2025 licence from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority in Abu Dhabi Global Market, and operates from Bermuda, New York, Miami, London, Paris and Abu Dhabi. In 2023 the firm absorbed the custody-and-trading platform Stablehouse and repositioned from trading shop into a full-service crypto quantitative investment firm, a trajectory its own history page documents year by year.

The Algorand agreement is one of a handful of protocol relationships the firm advertises. Its market-making page carries a testimonial from Douro Labs, the operator behind the Pyth Network oracle, crediting XBTO's engagement with improving the reliability of Pyth's price data. Outside liquidity provision, XBTO led a $3 million blockchain-native revenue-share note for Bermuda's flag carrier BermudAir in July 2025 — executed on the Polygon chain via Swiss-regulated platform Obligate, a sign of its broader [on-chain](/glossary/on-chain "Describes transactions that are recorded and permanently stored on a blockchain ledger, making them publicly visible and tamper-resistant.") capital-markets ambitions — and in March 2026 announced commitments toward a capital raise of up to $217 million, with technology firm ValueLabs taking a minority stake in XBTO Global.

The Self-Reported Desk Numbers

XBTO quantifies its market-making operation on its own site. The figures below are the firm's marketing claims — no third party audits them, and the firm does not publish per-asset performance, so they describe its general scale, not what it does for ALGO specifically.

Concept	Real-World Implication
$100B+ cumulative trading volume since 2015	Claims a decade of execution scale, but unaudited and unverifiable from public data
50+ integrated exchanges	Claims broad venue coverage, without specifying which exchanges
$2M+ order book depth	Claims the cumulative value of resting orders it can show at a time
~2% bid/ask spread	Claims tight quoting maintained across market conditions
98%+ uptime	Claims near-continuous liquidity provision around the clock

Two Roles, One Agreement

The first role is conventional: strategic market maker for ALGO on Tier-1 and Tier-2 exchanges — the major global venues and the smaller regional ones — continuously posting buy and sell orders to deepen the order book and narrow spreads. 'We are excited to serve as a market maker for them, helping to enhance liquidity and support efficient operations,' Philippe Bekhazi, XBTO's CEO, said at the time, adding that the firm works with only a few projects it believes in and that Algorand's enterprise adoption record and infrastructure fit its institutional approach.

The second role is where the deal becomes interesting. XBTO says it uses Algorand to move USDC — a stablecoin pegged one-to-one with the US dollar — between its custody wallets and exchanges during rebalancing and treasury operations. Algorand's [Pure Proof-of-Stake](/glossary/pure-proof-of-stake-ppos "A consensus mechanism used by some blockchains to validate transactions and secure the network. Unlike traditional proof-of-work, it relies on validat") consensus settles each block in a single round with immediate finality and no probabilistic waiting, and fees are negligible, which makes the chain a practical home for exactly the kind of frequent, small-value traffic a trading desk generates when it shuffles stablecoins between venues. Harpal Singh, chief financial officer of the Algorand Foundation, framed the arrangement as interoperability: 'We're proud to help facilitate seamless USDC transfers between custody wallets and exchanges, improving interoperability of DeFi assets.'

The Stablecoin Angle, Then and Now

The Foundation announced the partnership against a backdrop it has since substantiated with data. The August 2025 Algo Insights Report — the month the deal was signed — listed XBTO's selection among its monthly highlights and showed what the ecosystem looked like: monthly active wallets at 667,000, real-world-asset [total value locked](/glossary/total-value-locked "A key metric measuring the overall health of the DeFi ecosystem. It represents the total fiat value of all ALGO and ASAs currently deposited or 'locke") past the $100 million milestone at $105.5 million, and a 63.7% surge in new asset creations, much of it certificate tokenization.

By June 2026, the most recent Insights report at the time of writing showed USDC transacted volume on Algorand at approximately $751 million, a 72% month-over-month jump and the highest monthly level of H1 2026 — with USDC representing about 97% of the chain's stablecoin market cap and its transacted volume exceeding 15 times that market cap. That is the direction of travel the XBTO arrangement was meant to reinforce: a network increasingly used for moving dollar-pegged value, with a regulated market maker routing its own treasury over the same rails. The broader institutional thesis the two parties cited — an EY-Parthenon and Coinbase survey finding 83% of institutional investors planned to increase digital asset allocations in 2025, and a projection of over $600 billion in tokenized assets by 2030 — is context worth reading with the usual caution about forward-looking surveys.

One figure in the original announcement does not line up with the Foundation's own reporting: the release claimed 2.7 million monthly active users in 2025, several times the roughly 667,000 monthly active wallets the Foundation's August 2025 Insights report actually recorded. The discrepancy is a reminder that press-release metrics and the Foundation's internal analytics have not always agreed.

What Is Not Public

For all the ceremony, the parts of this deal that would let an outsider judge it are undisclosed. Neither party has published the commercial terms — what XBTO is paid, what incentives it receives, or whether the engagement involves the token loans Algorand historically extended to market makers (its June 2022 transparency report showed roughly 75 million ALGO loaned to market makers to support exchange liquidity, to be returned when their engagements completed). Whether XBTO's USDC flows are new business brought onto Algorand for this deal, or flows that would have happened anyway, is also unstated — the claim rests on the two parties' announcements, with no published wallet addresses or on-chain audit trail to confirm.

There is also a structural concentration to note. The announcement names a single strategic market maker, whereas Algorand's earlier transparency reporting referenced 'various market makers' in the plural. If the XBTO relationship thins or ends, ALGO's centralized-exchange depth depends on whatever quoting capacity remains. And the reader should keep in mind who is speaking: the Foundation selected XBTO, and its own CFO is among the quoted champions of the deal, so the announcement is a joint marketing artifact as much as a disclosure.

A year on, the practical question — has ALGO's order book actually deepened? — has no public answer. No spread or depth data from before and after the appointment has been published by either party, and centralized exchange order books are not transparent the way on-chain data is. Public discussion has also been quiet: a search of the Algorand forum for XBTO returns nothing, and the Foundation's Bluesky welcome post drew engagement in the single digits. The engagement appears to remain in place, but neither side has published a single metric measuring its effect.

Source

Source: https://www.xbto.com/resources/xbto-selected-as-market-maker-for-algorand-strengthening-liquidity-for-leading-layer-1-blockchain