Interactive Brokers Group Inc. are now introducing cryptocurrency trading, thus permitting users to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash through a partnership with crypto brokerage Paxos Trust.

Interactive Brokers is the Professional’s Gateway to the world’s markets.  IBKR provides clients from all over the globe with the ability to invest worldwide at the lowest cost, thus helping investors to take investing to the next level.

Investors invest globally in stocks, options, futures, currencies, bonds and funds from a single integrated account.

When placing your money with a broker, you need to make sure your broker is secure and can endure through good and bad times. They have strong capital position, conservative balance sheet and automated risk controls which are designed to protect IBKR and their clients from large trading losses.

Litecoin expressed:  The Chairman of Interactive Brokers announcing Litecoin and Big4crypto trading on IBKR because of client demand.

Recently, Thomas Peterffy, Interactive Brokers Group Chairman discussed the initiative on “Bloomberg Markets.

Question: Let me ask you about the demand.  What drove you to this decision? Do you have investors saying, we have to be able to trade this asset?

Thomas Peterffy:  Absolutely.  On one hand, we have many customers who manage bank balance portfolios and they are asking if, “could you please create the ability to gain some crypto exposure.” Simultaneously, also many of our regulatory investment advisors keep telling us that their customers are asking them to put some crypto in their portfolios.

And, in addition, they also have traders who would have been asking us to enable them to be able to trade the price relationships among the various different tokens and crypto futures and other crypto related assets. So, it appears to me that it has become common wisdom now that everybody should have some little percentage of their assets in crypto.

And, if you are going to say that you are broker and you are not going to offer, your customers are going to leave. And, go to other brokers who do offer that capability. So, that is where we are.

Question::  Everybody from the SEC to the Federal Reserve and law makers are looking at ways to regulate parts of this industry how much do you think will change about the way you can trade on a platform based on what happens next?

I do not think that much will change about what is visible to the customer because when our customer comes to our platform today even though we are offering this cryptos to them there is no difference between trading a stock, future or an option or trading Bitcoin or Litecoin or whatever.

Question: I wonder if customers will be able to cross margin their crypto positions. Would I be able to buy Bitcoin spot and then short the Bitcoin Future at the same time with Interactive Brokers, because it has been difficult?

Not as of now, because it will be very difficult from the securities angle. So, no at this moment.

Question:  Why is that difficult for platforms to provide? Because the difficulty of doing that arbitrage means there is a big gap between the spot and futures price?

I understand that gap for the time being will remain there at least on our platform, because we do not want to come close to the question of whether it is a security or not a security.