1 min. read
The Zerocap Story: From Pre-Funded Exchange Model to Off Exchange Custody at Institutional Scale
Benefits at a glance
Migrated from a dual-custody stack to a single platform
Removed the collateral ceiling that previously limited structured products desk growth
Collapsed multi-venue rebalancing workflows into a single custody framework
Zerocap is a regulated global market maker and liquidity provider, operating under a financial services licence in Australia and serving institutional and wholesale clients across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. “You’ve got to focus on what is your edge. Trading is what we’re good at. That’s what’s in our DNA,” shared Ryan McCall, Co-Founder and CEO of Zerocap. Processing billions of dollars in value annually, every part of the operation runs on infrastructure where failure is not a recoverable event. Fireblocks has been at the core of that infrastructure since 2020.
Why Fireblocks Has Run Underneath Zerocap for Six Years
Zerocap needed institutional-grade custody and connectivity to exchanges, liquidity providers, and counterparties without building and maintaining that network itself. “Wallet infrastructure is non-negotiable. It’s a critical piece of our security stack, and getting it wrong isn’t an option. Fireblocks is one less thing I have to worry about, which is exactly what you want from foundational infrastructure,” McCall shared.
That buy-versus-build decision has paid off in compounding ways. Every hour not spent on security and compliance integrations/tooling, transaction policy engineering, or wallet infrastructure maintenance is an hour available for trading, product development, and client relationships.
As Zerocap’s business shifted from manual, chat- and voice-based OTC trading toward electronic execution, the ability to automate settlement workflows while embedding governance controls directly into those workflows became critical. “The TAP engine has been hugely helpful,” McCall notes. “It allows us to build in whatever governance structure we need. Speed is essential in digital asset markets, and we needed more control over our wallet infrastructure and whitelisting process. Doing that through Fireblocks allows us to move a lot faster.”
Across six years, Fireblocks has been underneath nearly every major Australian digital asset milestone Zerocap has participated in:
- The ANZ Bank A$DC stablecoin launch
- Market making on tokenised carbon credits
- The ASX tokenisation pilots
- The RBA’s CBDC pilot
- Market making on Hong Kong spot Bitcoin ETFs
- Project Acacia on tokenised bonds
These are projects where institutional-grade custody is not a differentiator but a precondition for participation.
The Problem: Exchange Counterparty Risk as a Business Ceiling
Running a structured products desk on a major derivatives venue like Deribit creates a structural tension. To trade, you need margin on the exchange. Traditional pre-funded models require collateral to sit on each venue, sized to cover worst-case margin calls plus a buffer. That collateral earns nothing, can’t be deployed elsewhere, and carries full credit exposure to the exchange.
For Zerocap, the operational reality was constant balance monitoring across venues, continuous rebalancing as positions moved, treasury management around collateral allocation, and accepting exchange credit exposure as a cost of doing business. The team managing inventory and collateral across venues is doing materially less manual rebalancing, balance monitoring, and treasury work. That is roughly half the lift of the pre-Off-Exchange model. That capacity has been redeployed into higher-value work. “For a regulated desk where operational rigour is non-negotiable, removing that much manual process from a critical workflow is a meaningful efficiency gain. Every dollar parked on an exchange was a dollar we couldn’t deploy elsewhere, and every transfer was an operational risk we had to manage,” McCall explains.
When Fireblocks began building its own Off Exchange functionality, Zerocap was one of the customers who pushed for it. “We asked, they built it, and we were thrilled to be one of the first to put it into production,” McCall says.
The Solution: Fireblocks Off Exchange on Deribit
Fireblocks Off Exchange allows Zerocap to post collateral that remains in Fireblocks custody while being recognised as margin by Deribit. The assets never leave the Fireblocks security perimeter. The exchange receives the margin recognition it needs. Zerocap retains custody.
“Managing two parallel custody stacks creates unnecessary operational and security surface area. We asked Fireblocks to build equivalent functionality so we could consolidate onto a single platform. Off Exchange is a single pane of glass, single set of policies, single integration to maintain.”
RYAN MCCALL
Co-Founder and CEO
On Deribit, Zerocap trades the full product set: perpetuals, calendar futures, options, and spot. That breadth matters for a structured products desk that needs to express views and hedge exposures across the full curve. Running all of it under a single risk and custody framework, rather than fragmenting collateral by instrument type across venues, is a material operational improvement.
A Constraint Removed, a Business Expanded
The change in how Zerocap’s risk team thinks about exchange exposure is direct. “It’s a step change in counterparty risk management,” McCall says. “We get the capital efficiency of trading on a major derivatives venue without taking on the credit exposure of leaving collateral with the exchange. Frankly, this is the way. Once you’ve operated this way, going back to traditional pre-funded exchange models feels bad.”
Settlement is effectively instant from a margining perspective. The operational overhead of pre-funding and rebalancing across venues is gone. The collateral ceiling that previously limited the structured products desk is largely removed.
“Before Fireblocks Off Exchange, prudent risk management capped how much collateral we’d leave on any single venue. Now, that constraint largely goes away. We can size the book to the opportunity, not to our exchange exposure tolerance.”
RYAN MCCALL
Co-Founder and CEO
That shift from a collateral-constrained model to an opportunity-sized one is the core business outcome. Zerocap has materially increased the size and velocity of its book without proportionally increasing exchange-side collateral exposure. Off-Exchange has been the difference between running a structured products book in the millions and running it in the tens of millions.
“The bulk of our trading collateral now sits in Fireblocks custody rather than on the venue – an inversion of the pre-Off-Exchange model. That shift is what lets us size positions to the opportunity rather than to our tolerance for exchange exposure.”
RYAN MCCALL
Co-Founder and CEO
Looking Ahead
Zerocap’s trajectory points toward continued global expansion, higher stablecoin payments volume, and deeper on/off-ramping at institutional scale. Each of those growth vectors tightens the requirements on infrastructure, not loosens them. “As trading volumes, stablecoin payments, and on/off-ramping continue to scale substantially, the requirements on our infrastructure only get sharper: security, efficiency, and scalability, all simultaneously, all at institutional grade,” McCall says.
“Distribution of liquidity across venues, custodians, and counterparties is central to the strategy, and we see deeper integration with Fireblocks as critical to executing on it.”
RYAN MCCALL
Co-Founder and CEO
The Zerocap team plans to roll out Off-Exchange on additional venues and beyond that, implement a broader application of the model. We want to margin with our counterparties this way wherever it’s available. The model extends naturally to spot, and as tokenized assets mature as a collateral class, the team expects it to extend there too.
“The direction of travel is a world where Off-Exchange is the default settlement layer across our counterparty network, not a derivatives-margining solution sitting alongside everything else. The more activity we can run under that single framework, the better for us, for our counterparties, and for our clients.”
RYAN MCCALL
Co-Founder and CEO
