Large trades
OTC crypto trading for Welsh clients
Above roughly £50,000, an exchange order book stops being the right instrument. This is how desks price, settle and vet — and what a client in Cardiff Bay or the Vale of Glamorgan should expect to provide.
Verify any desk on the FCA Register before sending funds.
- Typical minimum
- £40k+
- Settlement
- FPS / CHAPS
- Onboarding
- Days
Most of this site is written for someone buying a few hundred pounds of cryptocurrency. This page is not. It is for the business owner who has just sold a company, the family that inherited a wallet, the property investor rebalancing into digital assets, and anyone else whose transaction is large enough that placing it on a public exchange would be a mistake.
The mechanics are genuinely different — different pricing model, different settlement rails, and a level of due diligence that catches people off guard. What follows is what to expect, and what to insist on.
Why an order book stops working
An exchange order book has finite depth. When you place a large market order, you fill against the best price first, then the next best, and so on until the order is complete. The average price you actually receive is worse than the price you saw — that is slippage, and it scales with size.
There is a second problem: visibility. A large resting order is public information. Other participants can see it and price against it, which is why serious size is rarely worked openly.
A desk solves both. You ask for a quote in a specific size, the desk gives you a firm price for the entire amount, and you either take it or you do not. The desk then manages its own risk. You have no slippage and no public footprint, and you pay for that in the spread built into the quote.
| Factor | Exchange | OTC desk |
|---|---|---|
| Typical minimum | From £1 | £40,000 – £80,000 equivalent |
| Pricing | Public order book | Quoted firm price for the full size |
| Slippage | You move the book against yourself | None — the price is agreed before execution |
| Settlement | Automatic | Faster Payments or CHAPS, negotiated |
| Contact | Ticket system | Named dealer, usually by phone |
| Onboarding | Minutes | Days — full SoF and SoW evidence |
| Discretion | Trade is visible in the book | Not printed to a public book |
If you are considering a desk
- The crossover is roughly £40,000 to £80,000, depending on the asset and its liquidity.
- Expect days, not minutes, to onboard — full source-of-funds and source-of-wealth evidence.
- Settlement is Faster Payments or CHAPS. No reputable UK desk handles physical cash.
- Compare the quote against your realistic average fill on an exchange, not the headline price.
- Verify the entity on the FCA Register and confirm settlement details by phone before sending anything.
The Welsh picture
Wales does not have a domestic crypto OTC industry of any size. That is a straightforward consequence of geography and history — UK institutional crypto is clustered in London, and has been since the beginning.
What Wales does have is a real and growing professional-services and fintech base, concentrated in Cardiff. FinTech Wales operates as the sector's membership body, Tramshed Tech has become the pan-Wales incubation hub with companies such as MyPinPad in its orbit, Cardiff University runs a dedicated Fintech Research Group, and Invest Cardiff actively markets the city as a fintech and RegTech location. Blockchain Connected sits within Technology Connected as a Welsh blockchain network. That ecosystem produces advisers, accountants and lawyers who understand digital assets, which matters far more to a high-value client than whether the execution desk is physically nearby.
On the wealth side, the Vale of Glamorgan, Monmouthshire and parts of Cardiff's northern suburbs contain the concentration of high-net-worth households that OTC desks and family offices actually serve. Those clients are typically covered remotely by London desks, and that is the normal servicing model for this business in any case — OTC has always been a phone-and-relationship trade rather than a walk-in one.
What the due diligence actually looks like
Registered firms carrying on cryptoasset business must apply customer due diligence under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, and enhanced measures where the risk is higher. A large one-off transaction from a new client is, by definition, higher risk.
In practice you should expect: identity verification for you and for any beneficial owners if a company or trust is involved; evidence of the specific funds being used; evidence of how the underlying wealth was generated; screening against sanctions and politically exposed person lists; and blockchain analytics on any wallet addresses involved on the crypto side. That last one catches people out — if the coins you are selling have passed through a mixer or an address associated with illicit activity at some point in their history, a desk will want to talk about it.
The Travel Rule adds a further layer on transfers, requiring originator and beneficiary information to accompany cryptoasset movements between firms, with customer due diligence triggered at a flat £800 threshold since 30 June 2026. At OTC size this is a formality rather than an obstacle, but it means the desk needs accurate details of any counterparty wallet or institution.
The tax consequences are proportionally larger
Everything on our tax page applies, at scale. Capital Gains Tax at 18% within the basic-rate band and 24% above it, against an annual exempt amount of £3,000, means a substantial disposal produces a substantial liability — and it crystallises on the date of disposal, not the date the money reaches your bank.
At this size the pooled-cost calculation matters enormously, and so does the same-day and 30-day matching rules that determine which acquisitions your disposal is matched against. Anyone executing a six-figure trade should have an accountant involved before, not after. Wales has a reasonable supply of firms who have done this work, concentrated in Cardiff and Swansea.
When a desk is not the answer
Two cases. If your trade is large but the asset is highly liquid and you are not in a hurry, working the order on an exchange over several days with limit orders can achieve a better average price than a desk quote. This requires discipline and attention, and it forgoes certainty.
And if the amount is large relative to your total wealth but modest in market terms — say £30,000 — you are probably better served by the institutional or VIP tier of a major exchange than by a standalone desk. Several platforms in our ranked comparison offer improved pricing and a dedicated contact at that level without the full OTC onboarding process.
Most journeys still start with an exchange account
Even where a desk eventually executes the trade, a verified account on a registered platform is usually the first step — it establishes the identity file and the banking relationship.
Questions
OTC questions
At what size does an OTC desk make sense?
The industry convention is a minimum somewhere around $100,000, though several desks accept smaller. CoinJar's trading desk, for instance, positions itself from around $50,000 upward, and Kraken's OTC desk uses the $100,000 benchmark. Some venues set the bar at $200,000 or more.
In practice, the crossover point is where your own order would visibly move the price on the exchange you were going to use. For a liquid asset like Bitcoin that is a large number; for a mid-cap token it can be surprisingly small.
Are there OTC desks physically based in Wales?
Not at any meaningful scale. Wales has a genuine and growing fintech cluster — FinTech Wales, Tramshed Tech and the Cardiff Fintech Research Group are the visible parts of it — but crypto OTC in the UK is heavily concentrated in London.
Welsh clients are almost always served remotely: a London desk, or the institutional arm of an exchange the client already uses. Remote service is the norm for this business everywhere, so the absence of a Cardiff office is not the disadvantage it might sound like.
What is the difference between source of funds and source of wealth?
Source of funds is where the specific money for this transaction came from — the account it is sitting in, and how it got there. Source of wealth is the bigger question: how you came to have significant assets at all.
For a £250,000 trade, source of funds might be a bank statement showing the balance and its origin. Source of wealth would be the business sale, property disposal, inheritance or accumulated earnings behind it, evidenced with completion statements, accounts or probate documents. Desks ask for both, and the second one surprises people.
How is a large trade settled in pounds?
Faster Payments handles most transactions up to its scheme limits, and it is instant. Above that, or where a bank imposes a lower internal cap, CHAPS is the usual instrument — same-day, higher cost, and the standard rail for property completions and other large one-off transfers.
Your own bank's policy matters as much as the desk's. A £400,000 CHAPS payment to a cryptoasset firm will be reviewed, and it is worth speaking to your relationship manager before rather than after.
Can an OTC desk handle physical cash?
Reputable UK desks do not deal in physical cash, and you should treat any offer to do so as a serious warning sign. Large cash transactions are precisely the pattern that anti-money-laundering supervision exists to catch, and no registered firm wants that exposure.
If a counterparty proposes a cash settlement for a six-figure crypto trade, disengage.
Is OTC cheaper than an exchange?
On the headline rate, usually no — a desk builds its margin into the quoted price. On the all-in outcome for a large trade, frequently yes, because the price you are quoted is firm for the whole size and you avoid the slippage that a large order suffers when it eats through an order book.
The way to evaluate it is to compare the desk's quote against the realistic average fill you would achieve on an exchange, not against the top-of-book price you can see.
What should I check before using a desk?
That the entity is on the FCA Register with a cryptoasset registration. That the trade is documented with a written confirmation before settlement. That settlement instructions come through an established channel and are verified by phone — invoice-redirection fraud is a genuine risk at this size. And that the desk is willing to explain its pricing rather than simply quoting a number.
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