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OTC Desk (Legacy)

Legacy feature

The OTC Desk is a legacy screen. Liquidity pools replace it: a pool lists each asset once and quotes every pair between them, with hedging recorded and retried. Use pools for new liquidity, and use this page only to manage deals you already have.

The OTC Desk lets your exchange sell and buy an asset at prices you set, one deal per trading pair. Users trade against a deal through Quick Trade (Convert). Each deal draws on the balances of one account on your exchange, so that account must hold enough of both assets in the pair.

The OTC Desk is at Operator Controls → Exchange → Legacy → OTC Desk. If your exchange's plan doesn't include it, Operator Controls shows an upgrade notice instead.

Move your deals to liquidity pools​

The OTC Desk page shows OTC deals are moving to liquidity pools. Click Build a pool from these deals to turn the deals one account backs into a paused liquidity pool. Your deals keep working until you activate the pool and change those pairs' routing. See Move OTC deals to a pool.

Manage an existing deal​

Each deal on the OTC Desk page shows its pair, its buy and sell prices, its minimum and maximum amounts, its inventory and its state. From a deal you can:

  • Configure it: change its parameters, pricing, funding account or hedging.
  • Pause it (Pause OTC Desk) to stop it quoting without deleting it, and Unpause OTC Desk to start it again.
  • Remove it (Remove OTC Desk). The pair then falls back to its other liquidity sources.

Deal settings​

When you configure a deal (or start a new one with Start a new deal desk), you set:

  • Deal parameters: the base asset (what is traded) and the asset it's priced in.
  • Market parameters: the minimum and maximum tradable amount of the base asset per trade, and the Increment Amount, the step by which the amount can go up or down in the order entry panel.
  • Pricing: the Type, either Manually set (static) or Dynamic (see below). The result is the price your users see and trade at, so check both the buy and the sell price before you continue.
  • Fund Source: the funding account the deal draws from. Its balances are the deal's inventory.
  • Hedge (optional): offset deal fills with a hedging strategy. Hedged deal fills appear on Exchange → Liquidity → Activity.

Static pricing​

With Manually set (static) you enter the displayed selling price and buying price directly. They don't change until you edit them. Static pricing suits an asset whose value you control, such as a token you issue yourself.

  • The selling price is what the exchange sells to the user at (what the user pays to buy).
  • The buying price is what the exchange buys from the user at (what the user receives when selling).

Dynamic pricing​

With Dynamic pricing the deal tracks a market price from an outside exchange and updates it on a schedule:

  • Formula: how the base asset's price is calculated. By default it uses the matching market on Binance, written as exchange_market, for example binance_btc-usdt.
  • Spread: a percentage added to the buy price and subtracted from the sell price.
  • Price refresh interval: how often the price is fetched and recalculated.
  • Price quote expiry time in seconds: how long a quote shown to a user stays valid before they must get a new one (at least 10 seconds).

Under Advanced you can combine prices with arithmetic, for example the average of three exchanges:

(binance_eth-btc+coinbase_eth-btc+kraken_eth-btc)/3

Click Show price result to check the buy and sell prices before you save.

How users trade against a deal​

OTC deals work through the Quick Trade interface. For a deal to answer a pair:

  1. The deal must be active (not paused).
  2. The pair's liquidity source under Operator Controls → Exchange → Legacy → Convert must be set to OTC Desk. An OTC Desk market answers on its own; nothing is compared with it.
  3. If you have routing policies under Exchange → Liquidity → Routing, the pair's policy must allow OTC deal.

When a user requests a trade, they get a quote at the deal's price. If the funding account has enough balance, the trade completes. If it doesn't, the trade is rejected, so keep the funding account topped up with both assets.