What exactly is the new trading platform GTX by Sanjian Su Zhu for?

Source: BlockBeats

According to a recent financing document circulating in the market, former Three Arrows Capital founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies are in the process of establishing a new centralized crypto trading platform called "GTX," with a financing target of $25 million. In addition to the two core members of Three Arrows, the two co-founders of CoinFLEX, Sudhu Arumugam and Mark Lamb, are also involved in the creation of GTX.

Since the collapse of the FTX platform, Su Zhu, who had been silent for a long time, suddenly became active, continuously sharing grievances from years ago with FTX and Alameda on Twitter. At the end of last year, he even posted chat records from 2019, showing that he had doubts about Alameda years ago. He even collaborated on Twitter with the founder of the collapsed Terra to criticize SBF. The recently circulated financing document for the "GTX" crypto trading platform, both in terms of its name and content, indicates that it is a platform closely related to FTX, or in other words, GTX aims to enter the crypto trading space starting from the collapse of FTX.

1. What does GTX do?

In simple terms, GTX targets the cryptocurrency claims market, or the debt market, starting with the claims from FTX.

Image source: GTX financing document

Su Zhu believes that looking at the ruins left by the FTX collapse, this is currently a new territory with 1 million creditors and a market size of $20 billion. FTX users are now creditors who cannot withdraw assets from the platform, and the current claims market, with its locked processes and high fees, makes the experience extremely unfriendly for small creditors.

The emergence of debt trading platforms like GTX provides creditors with an additional option; instead of waiting for years (referencing the Mt. Gox case) for court rulings, they can now exchange their claims for cash at around a 10% discount.

Of course, there are already similar products on the market, such as Xclaims, which currently allows creditors to transfer their claims at around a 13% discount. However, aside from high fees, Xclaims has not established a market. What Su Zhu wants is trading, a claims trading market filled with depth like an order book for BTC. Previously, it was difficult for only Mt. Gox to achieve this, and it was only after the series of bankruptcies in 2022 that such a market was formed.

Image source: GTX financing document

To give a more understandable, albeit possibly inappropriate, example, some old investors may remember that after the Dutch auction of Algorand, the promise of refund rights to all investors led to a trading platform that tokenized the refund rights, creating price fluctuations and arbitrage with ALGO. Su Zhu's claims market is somewhat similar.

Traditional finance certainly has a claims market, but there is no global platform for it, while the advantages of cryptocurrency are tokenization and liquidity, which provide more possibilities for the cryptocurrency claims market. FTX will not be the last black swan, and the market size will not only be $20 billion.

2. Team Members

The GTX document shows that they currently have a team of over 60 people, consisting of developers and professional operators with 10 years of experience in CEX operations.

Image source: GTX financing document

The most noteworthy members are undoubtedly the co-founders, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies from Three Arrows Capital, along with Sudhu Arumugam and Mark Lamb, the two co-founders of the CEX platform CoinFLEX. Their faces prominently featured in the document are quite striking, as the collapse of Three Arrows is well-known, and the CoinFLEX trading platform also announced bankruptcy restructuring last August.

Other executives include Chief Technology Officer Kent Deng, who has worked at Alibaba, Tencent, Oracle, and Huawei's technical team.

Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Lamb, who previously worked at Lehman Brothers, was the head of institutional sales at Amber Group and is also a content creator for the well-known crypto podcast Crypto Unstacked under Amber Group.

GTX plans to launch in 2-3 months, and in addition to crypto claims, GTX is expected to enter the stock lending market. There should be considerable interest from investors in this emerging market, and BlockBeats will continue to follow GTX's developments.
Su Zhu