OTC Crypto Desks Explained: Block Trades, RFQs and Stablecoin Deals

On 25 July 2025, Galaxy announced that it had sold more than 80,000 bitcoin for a client it described only as a Satoshi-era investor, a trade worth over $9 billion at the prices of the day. Nobody watching the public order books saw a single order of that size. That is the point of an over-the-counter desk: to move a position large enough to wreck a market without the market finding out until it is done. The same machinery, at a far smaller scale, now handles a Lagos importer converting stablecoins into dollars and a Dubai trading house swapping dirhams for USDT before paying a supplier in Shenzhen.

What an OTC desk does, in plain terms

An OTC desk is a dealer or broker that trades directly with a client rather than through a public order book. The client asks for a price on a specific size; the desk quotes a single all-in price for the whole lot; if the client accepts, the two sides settle bilaterally. There is no partial fill, no visible order, and no slippage after the quote is accepted.

Desks come in two broad types. Principal desks take the other side of the trade onto their own balance sheet and manage the risk afterwards, which is what the large trading firms do. Agency desks find the other side, or work the order across exchanges and liquidity providers, and charge for the service. Many exchanges run both an order book and an OTC desk, and the desk routes some flow into the book over time.

The minimums tell you who the service is for. Kraken's published OTC terms set a floor of $100,000 equivalent, offer automated executable quotes for orders between $100,000 and $1 million, take larger trades by chat, and require all trade obligations to be settled within 24 hours. Those numbers are typical of exchange-affiliated desks. Pure dealer desks often start higher.

How a block trade and an RFQ actually work

The request-for-quote (RFQ) is the basic unit of OTC trading. It has five steps, and the economics hide in the second.

1. Request. The client names the asset, side and size: sell 5 million USDT for US dollars, say, or buy 250 BTC against USDC.
2. Quote. The desk prices the trade off the live market, then adds a spread that reflects size, volatility, the asset's liquidity, how quickly the desk can hedge and how much it trusts the client to settle.
3. Accept. Quotes are live for seconds. On chat desks, a trader confirms the lot and price in writing; on RFQ screens and APIs, a click locks it in.
4. Settle. Cash and crypto move between the two sides, either from balances already held with the desk or by wire and on-chain transfer.
5. Confirm. Both sides get a trade confirmation for books and compliance.

For really large trades, a desk may "work" the order over hours or days instead, executing in slices across venues and charging a fee or a guaranteed average price. The Galaxy sale was described as a completed sale, and the firm did not say how it was executed. Its fourth-quarter 2025 results show what that kind of business looks like from the inside: 1,620 trading counterparties at year-end, up from 1,532 a quarter earlier, and a loan book of about $1.8 billion.

The market in 2025: stablecoins took over

There is no consolidated tape for OTC crypto, so all market data comes from individual platforms. The most detailed public series comes from Finery Markets, a vendor of OTC trading technology, which publishes figures from trades on its own network. Read them as one large sample rather than the whole market.

Its first-half 2025 review, covering 4.1 million trades, found that stablecoins featured in 74.6% of institutional spot deals, up from 46% a year earlier and 23% in 2023. Crypto-to-stablecoin flows rose 277% year on year while crypto-to-fiat rose about 49%. In other words, institutions increasingly treat a dollar stablecoin as the cash leg and only touch the banking system at the edges.

The nine-month review, built on more than 7.1 million trades, put growth in crypto spot OTC at 138% year on year against 22% for the top 20 centralised exchanges. Ether OTC volume grew 222%, aggregate stablecoin volume 136% and bitcoin 124%. OTC is growing faster than the lit market, which is what you would expect when corporates, funds and payment firms arrive with ticket sizes that order books cannot absorb cheaply.

Stablecoins' share also explains why OTC desks have become payments infrastructure. With total stablecoin supply around $306 billion as of October 2026 and USDT at roughly 60% of it, the most common OTC trade in many corridors is not a speculative bitcoin buy but a conversion between a stablecoin and a local or hard currency. Our USDT versus USDC comparison covers why desks price the two differently.

Who uses OTC desks

• Funds and long-term holders moving large positions, like the Galaxy client, where public selling would move the price.
• Miners and treasuries selling production or rebalancing reserves, often on a schedule.
• Payment companies and remittance firms that need to source stablecoins against fiat, or redeem stablecoins into fiat, every day.
• Importers and trading houses in dollar-short economies. Chainalysis, as reported by Mariblock, found sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion of crypto between July 2024 and June 2025, with stablecoins about 43% of volume and frequent multi-million-dollar stablecoin transfers linking Africa, the Gulf and Asia. Chainalysis noted its data excludes OTC and peer-to-peer flows, so the true figure is larger.
• Exchanges and brokers themselves, which lay off inventory with larger dealers.

For the business-payments side of this, see our guide to stablecoin payments for business.

Settlement and counterparty risk: where things go wrong

OTC trading strips out exchange risk and replaces it with counterparty risk. The trade is a private promise between two firms, and the period between agreeing a price and both legs arriving is where losses happen. Desks manage that window in four common ways.

The cautionary tale is 2022. When FTX collapsed in November, lender Genesis, a unit of Digital Currency Group that had been central to institutional crypto credit, froze redemptions on 16 November and filed for US bankruptcy protection on 19 January 2023, as reported at the time. Firms that had left pre-funded balances or open credit with failed counterparties became unsecured creditors.

An OTC quote is only as good as the balance sheet standing behind it once your money has left.

Since then, the institutional market has moved toward segregated custody and simultaneous settlement, and toward desks owned by regulated, public companies whose finances can be read in filings. Stablecoins themselves add a second layer: the cash leg is only as sound as the issuer's reserves and redemption terms, a subject covered in our history of stablecoin depegs.

Worked example: pricing a $5 million stablecoin redemption

The figures below are illustrative inputs, not quotes from any desk. A Dubai-based electronics distributor holds 5,000,000 USDT received from overseas customers and needs US dollars in its bank account to pay a supplier.

• Option A, exchange order book. It sells in pieces. Suppose the visible book absorbs the order at an average of 0.9993 after walking through levels, with a 0.10% taker fee. Proceeds: 5,000,000 x 0.9993 = $4,996,500, minus $4,996.50 in fees, so about $4,991,500, plus a bank withdrawal fee.
• Option B, OTC RFQ. The desk quotes 0.9990 all in for the full lot. Proceeds: $4,995,000 in one fill, settled by wire.
• Difference. The OTC route nets about $3,500 more and removes execution risk. If the book were thinner, or the market moving, the gap would widen quickly. If the desk's quote were 0.9980, the exchange would win by about $1,500.

The lesson is that an OTC desk is not automatically cheaper. It is a price for certainty. Treasurers should collect quotes from more than one desk, compare against the live book at the same moment, and agree settlement terms before agreeing price. Anyone setting up such arrangements should take advice from a qualified adviser on licensing and tax in their jurisdiction.

Regulation is catching up with the desks

OTC desks sit inside the licensing regimes that now cover crypto firms in most major markets. In the EU, exchanging crypto-assets for funds and executing orders for clients are services that need a CASP licence under MiCA. In the UAE, Dubai's VARA licenses broker-dealer activity separately from exchange activity. In the US, most desks hold money transmitter licences and, for derivatives, register with the CFTC. Every regime layers the FATF travel rule on top, requiring sender and recipient details to travel with transfers above thresholds. See our explainer on the travel rule and on CASP, VASP and money transmitter licences.

The practical consequence for clients is heavier onboarding. Expect to supply corporate documents, ownership details, source-of-funds evidence and wallet ownership proofs before the first quote.

What to watch next

• Finery Markets' full-year 2025 and H1 2026 data. Whether the stablecoin share of OTC deals stays above 70% will show if 2025 was a structural shift or a cycle.
• US market structure rules. Federal crypto market structure legislation in 2026 would define which OTC activity sits with the SEC and which with the CFTC.
• Bank-owned desks. More banks are entering crypto trading under clearer US and European rules; their arrival would tighten spreads for corporates who prefer a bank counterparty.
• Tokenised settlement. Simultaneous delivery against tokenised cash or deposits, discussed in our piece on tokenisation, would remove much of the bilateral risk described above.

OTC desks used to be a quiet corner of crypto for whales. With stablecoins now the dominant cash leg, they are becoming a foreign exchange market for a parallel dollar system, and they deserve the same scrutiny of credit, settlement and pricing that a treasurer would apply to any FX dealer.

About this researchMuffinPay InsightsIndependent analysis of stablecoins, CBDCs, cross-border payments and digital public infrastructure. Every figure is linked to its source. Read our editorial standards →