In this edition of BitRock Capital’s “Meet the Founder” series, STS Digital co-founders Gideon Hyams and Maxime Seiler share their journey from traditional finance to building a principal derivatives dealer for digital assets, and discuss the role of risk management, institutional trust, and company culture in shaping the business.                                             

Gideon Hyams

Co-Founder & Chairman, STS Digital

Maxime Seiler
Co-Founder & CEO, STS Digital

01/ Founders’ Journey and Market Opportunity

Q: Could you take us back to the beginning of STS Digital? You both brought extensive experience in traditional finance and derivatives trading to the company. What drew you to digital assets, and what opportunity did you see that led you to found STS together?

Gideon & Maxime: We both came from traditional finance. Gideon spent close to twenty years trading derivatives at UBS, while Maxime’s early career included roles at Credit Suisse and SEBA Bank, as well as an equity volatility trading role at a hedge fund. By 2021, it was clear that digital assets had developed real spot markets, but the derivatives layer was still where equities or FX had been decades earlier: pricing was inconsistent, documentation was limited, and there were very few counterparties that institutions could face with confidence.

Every mature asset class has principal dealers at its core, but crypto did not yet have one built to institutional standards. That was the gap we identified. We founded STS in 2021 to fill it by building a properly capitalised and regulated principal derivatives dealer for digital assets.

Q: What was the transition from trader to entrepreneur like for you both, and what did you have to learn as you began building the team and the business?

Gideon & Maxime: Trading teaches you to be right about markets. Building a company teaches you that being right is maybe a third of the job. We had to learn about hiring, regulation, capital raising, and building a culture across six offices.

Three lessons stand out. First, hire people who are better than you in their respective domains and give them real ownership. Our leadership team runs their own areas, and we do not micromanage. Second, decision speed matters more than perfect decisions. Most decisions are reversible, so make them quickly and adjust course quickly when needed. Third, company culture becomes increasingly important as the team grows. When you have motivated people with a great attitude, strong problem-solving skills, and close attention to detail, many good things get done each day. That progress compounds over weeks, months, and years.

Q: Since those early days, how has STS evolved, and how have the needs of its clients changed along the way?

Gideon & Maxime: We started in a small office with six people, building our first exchange connectors and an algorithmic market-making engine that would allow us to operate as a token market maker. As we won our first few contracts, we also began developing the pricing engine and risk-management tools required for a principal over-the-counter (OTC) platform, while applying for our licence.

Our initial OTC clients were high-net-worth individuals from our close network. Today, we quote options on more than 400 tokens, have traded over $5 billion in cumulative option notional, and operate a full structured-products suite alongside our market-making business. We now have around 60 people across six offices globally.

The bigger change has been our client base. Early clients mainly wanted access. Today’s institutions want a regulated counterparty, segregated custody, off-exchange settlement, proper legal documentation, and appropriate margin and credit terms. We have deliberately built the firm around those requirements, including obtaining our Class F licence from the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA).

02/ Product and Competitive Advantage

Q: STS has developed particular expertise in options beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. What makes this part of the market distinctive, and what has it taken for STS to build its capabilities in this area?

Gideon & Maxime: Options beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum are genuinely difficult to price and manage. Most tokens do not have a meaningful listed options market, so there is no screen price to rely on. Volatility data is patchy, underlying token prices can gap sharply, and hedging liquidity is fragmented across venues.

Quoting consistently requires genuine quantitative expertise to construct volatility surfaces from limited data, disciplined inventory management, and the balance sheet capacity to warehouse risk. We have invested years in building this pricing, hedging, and risk-management infrastructure. That is why this capability is defensible: there are no shortcuts to building it, and it is where clients most need a reliable counterparty.

Q: STS brings together OTC options, market making, and structured products. How do these capabilities complement one another and support the company’s broader vision?

Gideon & Maxime: They are one business, not three. Market making gives us continuous hedging capability. OTC options bring client flow and bespoke risk that sharpen our pricing. Structured products package these capabilities into defined outcomes—such as yield enhancement, capital protection, and participation—that institutions can incorporate into their portfolios.

All of it runs on one risk book and one pricing engine, so each part makes the others better. Our broader vision is a full-service, cross-margined platform for digital assets across all asset classes, where institutional counterparties can trade 24/7 via voice, a user interface, or an API.

Q: Why did STS choose to operate as a principal trading firm rather than simply matching buyers and sellers, and what value does this model bring to clients and the broader market?

Gideon & Maxime: Pure matching only works when two sides arrive at the same time and want to trade the same size. In crypto derivatives, that rarely happens. As a principal, we commit our own capital, quote firm prices, and take the other side of a trade before managing and recycling the resulting risk ourselves.

For clients, this provides certainty of execution, competitive pricing in size, and access to a single regulated counterparty under one legal agreement. For the broader market, it means that liquidity remains available even when there is no matching natural interest. It is a more difficult model to operate, which is precisely why it is valuable.

03/ Risk Management and Institutional Trust

Q: Risk management is central to any principal trading business. How does STS approach risk management, and how has that approach evolved as the business has grown?

Gideon & Maxime: Risk management is the business, not a department of it. We operate a three-day, 99% value-at-risk (VaR) framework, with market risk capped at 12.5% of equity and monitored in real time. Counterparty risk is managed through off-exchange settlement with partners such as BitGo, Fireblocks, and Copper, daily sweeps from trading venues, and conservative venue limits. Client assets are segregated and are never used for proprietary trading.

As we have grown, we have added a portfolio-margin model, a formal collateral framework with haircuts and concentration tiers, and monthly reporting to the BMA. The direction of travel has been towards greater automation and greater conservatism. This framework has held up through several full market cycles.

Q: As a BMA-regulated digital asset business, what does operating within a regulated framework mean for STS and its institutional clients?

Gideon & Maxime: The Class F licence is a full digital asset business licence, rather than a sandbox licence. It brings minimum capital requirements, custody and governance standards, and regular reporting obligations to the BMA.

For institutional clients, this means STS is supervised, has been audited at the group level for three consecutive years, and holds client assets in segregated custody. It also disciplines us internally: every new product undergoes a formal regulatory and risk assessment before it is launched. Increasingly, institutions simply will not trade with unregulated counterparties. Operating within a regulated framework is therefore both the right way to run the business and a commercial advantage.

04/ Looking Ahead: Industry Evolution and STS’s Role

Q: Looking at the crypto industry more broadly, how do you see it evolving over the next five to ten years? What do you believe will shape its next phase of growth and adoption?

Gideon & Maxime: The clearest trend is convergence with traditional finance. The line between digital assets and other asset classes will continue to fade as we see tokenised funds and real-world assets, regulated venues, and established financial institutions entering the market with meaningful budgets.

The next phase of growth will be shaped by regulatory clarity in major jurisdictions, the maturity of custody and settlement infrastructure, and products that address genuine institutional mandates rather than speculation. In five to ten years, we expect digital assets to be a normal part of institutional portfolios, with trading taking place around the clock. We also expect tokenisation to have brought traditional assets onto the same rails.

Q: What role do you expect institutional participation and derivatives to play in the industry’s next stage, and how do you see STS contributing to that development?

Gideon & Maxime: In every mature asset class, derivatives volume eventually becomes a multiple of spot-market volume, and crypto is following the same path. Institutions do not only want directional exposure; they also need hedging, yield, and defined outcomes, all of which can be delivered through derivatives.

Our role is to serve as the regulated principal counterparty that enables banks, asset managers, and corporates to use these instruments safely. As regulatory approvals allow, we also intend to extend the same capabilities to tokenised traditional assets.

Q: Against this backdrop, what are the key priorities for STS over the next few years, and what would success look like for the company?

Gideon & Maxime: Three priorities. First, deepen our core options franchise. Second, scale our distribution through banks, brokers, and platform partners rather than relying only on direct relationships. Third, extend the platform into tokenised traditional assets under our regulatory framework, supported by continued investment in technology, including our API and client portal.

Success would be STS established as the reference principal derivatives dealer in digital assets: profitable, conservatively capitalised, and treated by clients the way they treat their long-standing prime counterparties.

05/ Founder Reflections

Q: Looking back at the journey so far, which decisions or lessons have had the greatest influence on how you and the team are building STS today?

Gideon & Maxime: A few decisions stand out. Getting regulated early, despite the cost and effort, has shaped everything since. Choosing to operate as a principal dealer rather than an agency broker defined both our identity and our economics. Deciding to build our technology from the ground up was the longer and more painful route, but it allowed us to create the technology stack we had envisioned.

Hiring great people early and giving them real ownership enabled the firm to scale without the founders becoming a bottleneck. Maintaining a rigid risk-management framework throughout the downturns also meant that we were still standing—with both capital and credibility—when others were not.

STS also stands for “Shoulder to Shoulder”, and that reflects our cultural lesson: build alongside your clients and colleagues, not above them.

Q: What advice would you give to entrepreneurs building companies in the crypto industry?

Gideon & Maxime: Build for the industry crypto is becoming, not the one it was. Take regulation seriously from day one. It is slower and more expensive, but it compounds in your favour. Manage risk as though the worst month will happen, because in this industry, it will.

Hire people who have experienced a full market cycle, and make sure you are solving a genuine client problem—the technology is the means, not the point. And expect the journey to take longer than you think, so choose a co-founder and a team you genuinely want to be in the trenches with.