FNG Exclusive Interview… As traditional finance and digital assets continue to converge, brokers are under growing pressure to support a broader range of instruments, operate around the clock and adapt their technology accordingly. Ahead of TOKEN2049, FNG spoke to Tom Higgins, CEO of Gold-i, about the growing role of Decentralised finance (DeFi) , the evolution of Gold-i’s MatrixNET liquidity bridge and what brokers need to consider as digital assets become an increasingly mainstream part of their offering.

FNG: Hi Tom. You are heading to TOKEN2049 and Digital Assets Summit in Singapore. What do you expect to be the biggest talking points at these events?

Tom: The digitisation of traditional assets is undoubtedly the biggest area of interest at the moment. The industry is being transformed by DeFi platforms such as Hyperliquid operating in traditional markets and centralised digital asset exchanges increasingly listing traditional instruments.

Tokenising traditional assets and trading them using digital asset infrastructure offers significant benefits, including lower costs and 24/7 trading. Brokers need to embrace this shift as clients increasingly expect 24/7 access and a broader range of asset classes. Ignoring DeFi today is like ignoring AI – it is too important to overlook.

FNG: What does the growth of DeFi mean from a technology perspective?

Tom: Connecting a liquidity bridge to DeFi platforms and exchanges is very different from connecting to traditional markets – and is extremely complex. The technology stack, connectivity and support requirements are all very different. Gold-i has become an expert in this space -through integrations with our multi-asset MatrixNET liquidity bridge with a number of DeFi platforms including Hyperliquid and Derive.xyz. We have also built strong relationships with the providers of DeFi networks and protocols. These relationships work both ways: DeFi firms want introductions into the traditional financial markets, while traditional brokers want access to DeFi.

FNG: What are you hoping to get out of the Singapore events?

Tom: We have always been at the forefront of providing digital asset access to brokers. To retain this position, we continually need to evolve – and in fact, are already looking at expansion beyond connectivity to include a broader range of digital asset services. Being at the events in Singapore, where many of the key institutional players will be, helps us to understand where the industry is heading. It’s a learning opportunity as well as a chance to build relationships and explain to key participants in the industry how Gold-i can add value.

FNG: Gold-i commissioned research this year into attitudes, adoption levels, strategic priorities and future expectations around cryptocurrency trading among firms operating in the retail FX space. Were the findings as you expected?

Tom: I wasn’t surprised that the findings showed strong crypto demand from broker and prop trading firm clients and that most of these firms now expect crypto to become a standard part of the FX and CFD trading proposition. However, one finding that stood out to me is that 48% of respondents are not fully confident that their current infrastructure is suitable for operating 24/7 and coping with the large number of price updates per second in the crypto space. This is obviously an area where we can help.

The full findings are available in our report, ‘Market Hype or Must-Have Offering: Crypto’s Impact on Retail FX’, which can be downloaded here: https://www.gold-i.com/crypto-report-2026.

FNG: MatrixNET is Gold-i’s flagship product that provides liquidity management across multiple asset classes. How has it evolved over the past year?

Tom: We are seeing very strong demand for our liquidity bridge, MatrixNET, particularly as clients look for technology that can support FX, digital assets and DeFi within the same environment. MatrixNET delivers ultra-low latency performance of sub 2 milliseconds and is integrated with over 100 Liquidity Providers and Exchanges, and with all the major front-end platforms used by brokers and prop firms, including MetaTrader 4 (MT4), MetaTrader 5 (MT5), Virtex, DXtrade, CLEO and TradeLocker.

Over the past year we have added significantly more advanced B-Book functionality, enhanced liquidity-provider monitoring and introduced what we call ‘sin bin’ logic, which can identify underperforming liquidity providers and temporarily remove them from the book. We have also introduced liquidity-depletion functionality to help protect brokers from certain high-speed trading strategies and we have expanded our ability to create synthetic instruments.

We are continually evolving MatrixNET  and constantly testing it in terms of scalability and performance. It can now handle hundreds of thousands of price updates per second across thousands of instruments – and it has maintained 99.99% uptime over the last 12 months.

FNG: How is Gold-i currently using AI and where do you find it most effective?

Tom: Gold-i has become an AI-first company and we use it across all key functions. As an example, we have automated testing for new products and can now test every function within a system in a matter of hours, which significantly accelerates development. Ultimately, AI enables us to achieve far more with the same resources. In terms of support, having experienced support staff who understand the technology and the markets and can talk to our clients remains important. Maintaining the combination of AI-driven efficiency and high-touch, expert support is very important to us and is a key part of Gold-i’s approach.