Nelson Minier, head of Kraken OTC trading platform, shared his views on why traders flock to the crypto world.

The cryptocurrency market continues to attract former Wall Street traders. Nelson Minier, the head of Kraken OTC platform, told Nasdaq TradeTalks why cryptocurrencies attract traders and what they lack on the traditional Wall Street.

“Wall Street ain't what it used to be. The first 15 years I was on Wall Street, it was fun. I was very fortunate, I started in the CDS market which feels a lot like crypto. Here you have a lot of financial innovation, a lot of trading...It feels very much like that, there's a lot of energy and enthusiasm about this progress and where it's going.”

According to Minier, now more and more managing directors from hedge funds are coming to the cryptocurrency market.

“I think it's going to be one of those things in a blink that everybody is going to start chasing it,” Minier believes.

With the launch of Bakkt bitcoin futures, more institutional investors and traders are expected to enter the market. While the influx of institutional investors into the crypto is slow, Minier notes.

Minier also took part in The Block’s podcast called The Scoop. Answering the question of the host, Minier explained why he personally decided to leave Wall Street in favor of the crypto world:

“First thing was volatility and price action. I’m not going to be one of these guys that said I looked at the white paper, I have the white paper in my house, like I stare at it all the time and I can read it a hundred times — I’m not gonna get this revelation from it. Maybe I’m not smart enough. I saw the price action like, what the hell is this bitcoin thing like why is it going up 10% at a time? And me being a merging markets trader I love volatility.”

At that time, Minier was running the emerging market bond trading at Credit Suisse.

It is possible that Minier sees only the situation with Kraken. Recently, the American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said that its custody service accepts cryptocurrency deposits worth hundreds of millions of dollars from institutional investors every week.

Despite the generally optimistic attitude, Minier noted that bitcoin is unlikely to be fully able to be considered a safe haven asset in the near term.

“I think it's still one of the most volatile assets on the planet. We just dropped from $10,800 to $10,000 in a few blinks.”