What Is an OTC Desk? How Crypto OTC Trading Works

An OTC desk is a dealer that buys and sells crypto directly with its clients, away from public exchanges, usually in large amounts.

Instead of placing orders on an order book, you ask the desk for a price, it quotes one price for the whole amount, and if you accept, the trade settles between the two of you.

OTC stands for "over the counter", meaning a deal done between two parties rather than on an exchange, and desks exist because order books run out of depth.

A large order eats through the best prices and moves the market against you and a lot of the OTC trading happens because of the lack of liquidity on the exchanges.

A good desk gives you one price, one named counterparty and clear settlement terms. A bad one is vague about at least one of the three.

How an OTC trade works

Getting that one price looks much the same at every desk, whether you trade by phone, chat or screen.

1. Onboarding. The desk checks who you are, or who owns and controls the company or trust you're trading for, and where the money comes from.

2. Request for quote. You give the asset, the size and whether you're buying or selling, and on some platforms one request goes to several liquidity providers at once.

3. A firm quote. The desk comes back with one executable price for the whole amount, valid for a set time.

4. Execution. You accept, the price is locked, and any market move after that is the desk's problem.

5. Settlement. Money and assets change hands on the terms agreed up front.

6. Confirmation. You get a record of the price, size, time and settlement details, which becomes your audit trail.

The firm quote is the whole point. An indicative quote is a ballpark that can move, so if you're getting a number by chat, ask which kind it is before you send anything.

Our guide to buying large amounts of bitcoin walks through the same steps with the paperwork, bank limits and custody included.

The different kinds of OTC desk

The named counterparty is where desks differ most, because "OTC desk" covers several different setups.

With a principal desk, the desk itself is your counterparty and takes the market risk.

With an agency desk or an RFQ platform, you're trading with whoever you were matched with. Peer-to-peer trading is the one that catches people out. It sometimes gets called OTC because there's no order book, but no dealer stands behind the trade.

Whatever the model, ask which legal entity will face you on the contract.

How OTC desks make money

Most desks don't charge a separate fee.

They quote an all-in price and earn the difference between that price and what the coins cost them. Agency desks are the exception, because they charge a commission instead.

No fee doesn't mean free, then, and you'd want to know how wide a typical spread is.

What moves a spread is easier to pin down.

Bigger or more volatile trades cost more to hedge, thinly traded assets cost more than bitcoin, and generous terms like trading before you've paid carry risk the desk prices in.

So the comparison that works is the plain one, asking two desks for a firm quote on the same trade at the same moment and comparing what you'd receive.

Settlement is where the risk lives

An exchange trade settles inside the exchange.

A desk trade is bilateral, with no clearing house in the middle, so both sides have to deliver, and the settlement terms decide who's exposed if something goes wrong.

• Pre-funded. You deposit first, then trade, which leaves your money with the desk until the trade completes. Most new clients are asked to do this.

• Settle later. You trade first and pay within a deadline, like 24h in some cases.

• Delivery versus payment. Both legs settle together or neither does. It's the cleanest model on paper and it cuts the risk a lot, but if a desk says its settlement carries no risk at all, ask how.

• Off-exchange settlement. Your assets stay with a custodian while you trade and only net amounts move.

Stablecoins have quietly become the main way to settle. On Finery Markets' institutional network, they "accounted for 78% of all OTC trades" in 2025, up from 26% two years earlier, which is why stablecoin settlement now matters as much as bank wires.

The other option is settling into custody.

When the desk and the custodian sit under the same regulated firm, the coins can go straight from the trade into segregated storage without touching an exchange, which is how RYKI's custody works with our desk.

Minimum trade sizes

There's no industry-wide minimum. Published figures run from about $1,000 to half a million dollars, because "OTC" covers both electronic quote screens and voice desks built for large blocks.

OTC trading vs exchange trading

The real difference is how the price gets found.

On an exchange, buyers and sellers post orders to a central book and everyone sees the same prices, while over the counter you agree a price directly with a dealer and settle with them.

Market impact is the row we'd look at first.

On the day of the August 2024 sell-off, Kaiko found slippage on one BTC-EUR market above 5%, and a desk quote takes that uncertainty off you, because sourcing the coins becomes the desk's job.

Desks still leave footprints, since they hedge in the market, and analysts read miners' OTC desk balances as a sign of coming selling.

So when does a desk make sense?

It depends on your order relative to the depth resting near the price on the venues you can use, and for most people that point arrives somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, roughly where many desks set their minimums.

Who uses OTC desks

The client list of almost any desk looks similar.

• Funds and asset managers moving size without showing their hand.

• Miners selling the coins they produce, which is why analysts track their flows to desks.

• Family offices and wealthy individuals buying or selling quietly, usually with custody arranged at the same time, as our family office custody guide explains.

• Company treasuries converting between crypto and fiat on a schedule.

• Payment firms and gaming operators moving between stablecoins and bank money every day, like the operators using our iGaming payment solutions.

• Early holders selling once, like the "Satoshi-era investor" whose more than 80,000 bitcoin Galaxy sold in July 2025.

How big is the crypto OTC market?

Nobody knows exactly, because OTC trades are private and nobody reports them centrally.

The most useful recent estimate comes from Finery Markets' Crypto OTC Trading Report 2024, which surveyed liquidity providers and came out at about 39 billion dollars a day, while admitting the estimates "varied by more than tenfold".

The trend is clearer than the total. Spot OTC volume on Finery's own network grew 109% in 2025. That's one platform's data, but it points the same way as everything else we've seen.

From chat rooms to regulated desks

Crypto OTC started on a chat channel.

The #bitcoin-otc IRC channel, active since at least 2011, let people trade one to one on a web of trust.

Institutional desks like Genesis and Cumberland followed in 2013 and 2014, and by 2018 Reuters described firms negotiating trades "over Skype".

The collapses of 2022 changed the business more than anything before them. FTX failed in November 2022, Genesis's lending arm filed for bankruptcy in January 2023, and its trading business shut down later that year.

Since then, clients ask desks the questions they always should have, about who holds the money, under which licence, and what happens if the desk fails.

Is OTC trading legal?

Yes, in most major markets, as long as the desk is properly registered or licensed where it operates.

Regulators look at the activity, and FATF tells countries to "focus on the underlying activity, not the label or business model", so a desk trading crypto for clients as a business is a virtual asset service provider almost everywhere.

• European Union. Dealing and executing orders are MiCA services that need authorisation, and the transitional period for existing firms ran "until 1 July 2026" at the latest.

• United States. FinCEN treats crypto exchangers as money transmitters that must register as money services businesses, and states license separately.

• United Kingdom. Crypto exchange providers register with the FCA today.

• Cayman Islands. Crypto businesses must be registered with or licensed by CIMA, with full licences for custody and trading platforms, as our Cayman crypto licensing guide explains.

• British Virgin Islands. Providers register with the BVI Financial Services Commission.

How to check an OTC desk is real

For you, the practical version of that risk is a fake desk.

The FBI counted $11.4 billion in crypto-related losses in 2025, and a fake desk often looks like a real one, sometimes down to a borrowed licence number, so the checks have to go beyond the website.

1. Get the exact name of the legal entity you'd be contracting with, and find it on the regulator's own register, such as CIMA's entity search in Cayman, the BVI FSC register or the FCA's Firm Checker in the UK.
2. Check the status and the licence type, because registers list cancelled firms too, and a registration for one activity doesn't cover another.
3. Match the contact details to the register, and call back on a number from the firm's official site.

Any one of these red flags is enough to stop.

• Prices below the market. Nobody sells bitcoin at a discount to strangers.
• Contact that starts on a messaging app, or a dealer whose details don't match the official site.
• Payment to a personal account, or bank details that change mid-deal.
• No KYC, or a promise of anonymity.
• Pressure to move fast or skip a test transaction.
• Offers to recover money you've already lost, which CIMA says should be treated "as fraudulent."

A real desk will check you properly, too. If a desk is happy to trade six figures without asking where the money came from, that tells you how it treats other clients' money.

How RYKI's desk works

Our desk handles block trades from $50,000 to $100 million and more in bitcoin, ether and other major assets, with a named dealer looking after you.

You get one all-in quote for the full size, benchmarked to institutional market data, and trades settle the same day by bank wire where cut-offs allow, or in stablecoins usually within minutes, with the option to settle straight into our segregated cold-storage custody.

RYKI Ltd is licensed by CIMA in the Cayman Islands as a virtual asset custodian, RYKI Inc. is registered with the BVI Financial Services Commission, and RYKI holds FINTRAC MSB registration in Canada, all of which you can check on the registers above.

To talk through a trade, send an enquiry through our institutional OTC trading page and a dealer will come back to you within two business hours.