Bitget announced a partnership with Arkis today that aims to reshape how institutional desks access liquidity and financing across venues. The deal brings Direct Market Access (DMA) to Bitget inside Arkis’s prime brokerage framework, letting institutions execute trades on Bitget while financing those positions from a single, portfolio-level margin pool rather than juggling isolated margin accounts on multiple platforms.
Under the integration, trading firms can continue to use the familiar sub-account and API workflows they already have in place, but they will be able to borrow against a unified portfolio margin that spans Bitget and other venues supported by Arkis. That means firms no longer need to overcapitalise for separate, venue-specific margin rules; instead, positions can be netted at the portfolio level, which should materially improve capital efficiency and reduce balance-sheet friction for active strategies. The technical plumbing and commercial terms are designed to mirror how professional trading teams actually operate, prioritising operational clarity and capital velocity.
“Institutions want to deploy capital where it works hardest, without having to manage fragmented margin across platforms,” said Gracy Chen, echoing a common refrain among professional market participants. The integration, she added, “gives institutional traders a more practical way to access Bitget while managing risk and financing at the portfolio level.” The announcement positions Bitget as not only an execution venue but also as a node inside a broader institutional infrastructure stack.
For its part, Arkis says the arrangement reflects its core value proposition: replacing isolated, venue-specific collateral requirements with a single credit framework that enables portfolio-level financing across centralized and decentralized markets. “Trading firms need capital efficiency without sacrificing risk discipline,” said Serhii Tyshchenko. “By enabling DMA to Bitget within Arkis’s unified margin framework, this partnership allows institutions to finance positions holistically across venues while maintaining the controls expected in professional trading environments.” The Arkis team has been steadily building out its prime brokerage toolkit since early funding rounds and private betas, pitching capital efficiency as the service’s primary product.
Institutional Trading Boost
The timing of the tie-up also speaks to a broader market shift. Bitget has been promoting its Universal Exchange (UEX) model, an attempt to collapse crypto, tokenized securities, commodities and other assets into a single operating environment, and independent research has highlighted growing institutional engagement with platforms that bundle liquidity, execution and financing. Messari’s recent analysis of the UEX concept identified portfolio-level margin, direct market access and integrated execution as the kinds of features professional capital increasingly expects from modern exchanges. The Bitget–Arkis pairing reads like a practical implementation of that thesis: execution on a deep, multi-asset venue combined with prime-brokerage financing.
Bitget, which publicly markets itself as the world’s largest UEX and notes millions of token listings and tens of millions of users across its ecosystem, has been steadily expanding its institutional footprint through product launches and partnerships. For institutional users, the Arkis integration promises a clearer path to scale trading activity across spot and derivatives markets without artificially constraining capital to specific venues. For trading firms that run multiple strategies across markets, that kind of balance-sheet relief can be a genuine performance lever.
Execution and financing are two sides of the same coin in professional trading. By pairing Bitget’s execution environment with Arkis’s prime-brokerage capabilities, both firms are pitching a streamlined experience for institutions navigating complex digital markets, one that prizes capital efficiency, robust risk controls and operational simplicity. Whether the model will spur a new wave of institutional flow onto Bitget will depend on execution, counterparty risk appetite, and how other venues respond, but the partnership is a clear signal that institutional plumbing continues to be the next battleground in crypto market structure.
