How Genius Is Trying to Turn Crypto Into Wall Street’s Trading Terminal

Crypto was supposed to replace Wall Street. And now, more than ever, trading on exchanges is looking more indistinguishable from onchain counterparts.

But for all the back-and-forth, there are still a lot of improvements to make, according to Genius founder Armaan Kalsi.

“What are the three things that make it so that you would use a centralized exchange over decentralized exchange?” Armaan Kalsi tells Coinage. “Number one, UX… it’s not a great experience for the end user… we go to execution… and then the third thing… is privacy.”

That’s the part of crypto most people don’t want to admit. For all the talk of decentralization, users still choose centralized exchanges because they’re offering more pieces that make trading easier. As the CEO at the CZ-backed trading startup Genius, Kalsi isn’t trying to fight that reality. He’s trying to rebuild it.

“What would it look like if you gave users all of the same guarantees that you gave them on a centralized exchange, but then had completely permissionless, open access to all of the assets?” he asked.

That question sits at the center of what Genius Trading is building — and it’s becoming more relevant by the day. Because crypto isn’t just trading tokens anymore. It’s moving toward something much bigger. Hyperliquid continues to prove this out as people trade tokenized versions of gold, silver, and even oil.

“We're excited about the tokenization of everything,” Kalsi said. “The total number of assets that people will use to trade… will exponentially increase.”

More assets coming to more users in more jurisdictions is at the heart of the opportunity that Genius is chasing, and part of the reason why the project was able to secure an eight-figure deal from CZ's YZi Labs earlier this year. While Binance's BNB chain is certainly part of the strategy at Genius, the project is taking a multi-chain approach. It's also, coincidentally, on of the pain points Kalsi hopes to solve for users.

Different networks, fragmented liquidity, slow bridges — the experience feels nothing like the seamless trading environment users expect. And that’s the gap Genius is trying to close. The idea is simple but ambitious: remove the concept of “chains” from the user experience entirely. Turn crypto into something that feels like a single, unified market.

“I want to give people a toggle at the top of the terminal that says, 'unified balance,'” Kalsi said. “You don’t need to know what the network even is."

That’s not just better UX — it’s a prerequisite for adoption. Because the next wave of users isn’t going to learn how crypto works. They’re going to expect it to work like everything else. But even if the interface improves, there’s a deeper problem the industry still hasn’t solved.

“I would say that the market is sleeping on capital efficiency,” Kalsi said. “If the people who are in TradFi come to crypto and they’re like… there’s a lot of capital inefficiency here… why would we want to trade these assets?”

And in order to bring stocks, funds, or bonds onchain — a terminal is going to have to match the performance of the systems those assets already live in.

“It’s not a question of whether or not we have a synthetic representation of Tesla or Apple,” Kalsi said. “It’s like, can you quote it as tightly as you could quote it on… NYSE?”

Until that happens, tokenization remains more promise than reality. But crypto has been here before. “The last decade of crypto can be looked at as a sandbox,” Kalsi said.

A sandbox filled with speculation — memecoins, altcoins, and everything in between — that proved the infrastructure could handle real volume. The difference now is what’s being built on top of it.

As Wall Street moves in and real-world assets come onchain, the question isn’t whether crypto can create markets. It’s whether it can unify them.

“Come one, come all… integrate them and aggregate them into one interface,” Kalsi said.

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