Aquanow

Aquanow is a digital asset infrastructure company that provides the backend plumbing enabling banks, brokerages, fintechs, payment providers, and enterprises to offer crypto trading, stablecoin payments, and digital asset custody to their own customers. Rather than competing with exchanges or retail apps, Aquanow operates as a principal trading counterparty and white-label infrastructure engine — institutions plug in via API and receive liquidity, execution, compliance tooling, and settlement without building those systems themselves.

Founded in Vancouver, Canada in 2018 by Phil Sham (CEO) and Andy Leung (CTO), Aquanow emerged from the founders' careers in traditional finance. Sham previously led global electronic trading at CC&L Investment Management and built trading solutions at CIBC Capital Markets; Leung served as VP of electronic trading at RBC Capital Markets and consulted for TMX Group and HOOPP. They co-founded Aquanow to serve the wave of Canadian crypto exchanges, ATM operators, and fintech apps that needed wholesale institutional liquidity but had no counterparty to turn to. From that wholesale brokerage starting point, the company has expanded into a full infrastructure stack with 200+ employees across offices in Canada, the United States, the UAE, Spain, and additional locations.

How It Works

Aquanow's platform sits between its institutional clients and the global digital asset markets. When a bank or fintech wants to offer crypto trading, it integrates with Aquanow's APIs, and Aquanow handles price discovery (aggregating liquidity from major exchanges), order execution, settlement, custody, and compliance reporting. The client-facing product — app, portal, or trading desk — is the institution's own brand; Aquanow is the invisible layer underneath.

The core business is built on three product categories.

Digital Asset Brokerage covers three delivery modes: a direct API integration for automated, high-volume trading (streaming live prices, full order lifecycle management, advanced order types including market, limit, RFQ, and TWAP); a Trading Portal for web-based execution without integration work; and an OTC Desk offering 24/7 block trade execution with personalized service for large orders. The brokerage supports 65+ digital currencies and 220+ trading pairs.

Trading Infrastructure allows institutions to embed Aquanow's liquidity and execution within their own branded platform under their own license. The client controls the user experience, pricing rules (spreads and fees), compliance workflows, and client relationships, while Aquanow supplies the market connectivity and order management backend. This tier supports 90+ digital assets.

Embedded Brokerage is Aquanow's fully managed, licensed brokerage delivered as a complete service. Institutions using this tier have Aquanow handle all brokerage operations: liquidity, execution, settlement, custody (cold and warm storage with crypto insurance and segregated bankruptcy-remote accounts), KYC, AML, Travel Rule compliance, transaction monitoring, client accounts, and fiat rails. Onboarding takes as little as two weeks.

Stablecoin Payments completes the platform with send, receive, and manage capabilities. Institutions can pay counterparties in fiat while Aquanow delivers stablecoins cross-border, accept stablecoin payments with automatic fiat settlement, and hold balances in hosted wallets — enabling faster, lower-cost cross-border settlement compared to traditional correspondent banking rails.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Aquanow's most direct integration with the Solana network came in March 2022, when the company joined Pyth Network as a first-party data publisher. Pyth is a Solana-native oracle protocol purpose-built for latency-sensitive financial pricing. Aquanow contributes real-time digital asset market data — drawn from its own trading operations as a principal — directly into Pyth's on-chain price feeds on Solana mainnet. Those feeds are consumed by leading Solana DeFi protocols including Drift, Mango Markets, Solend, Zeta Markets, and others that depend on accurate, low-latency pricing for perpetuals, lending, and options markets.

SOL itself is a first-tier supported trading asset across all of Aquanow's brokerage products, alongside BTC, ETH, USDC, USDT, and XRP. This means institutional clients using the Aquanow platform can offer their end users SOL trading with the same liquidity depth and execution quality as major assets.

A further Solana connection runs through Aquanow's partnership with Visa. Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities to include Solana and Ethereum, with Aquanow providing the infrastructure for issuers and acquirers across the CEMEA region to settle transactions in USDC. This arrangement — announced in November 2025 with an annualized run rate exceeding $2.5B — represents Aquanow-powered USDC flowing across the Solana network for real-world payment settlement at institutional scale.

Supported Assets and Pairs

The Liquidity and Conversion product covers 65+ digital currencies and 220+ trading pairs including USDC, USDT, BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, AAVE, ADA, ALGO, ARB, ATOM, AVAX, BONK, DOGE, LINK, NEAR, PEPE, UNI, and dozens more. Fiat rails support USD, EUR, GBP, AED, AUD, CAD, and TRY. The Trading Infrastructure tier supports 90+ assets. Aquanow's principal model means it acts as counterparty on all trades — spread-based all-in pricing rather than a published fee schedule.

Regulatory Status and Security

Aquanow holds regulatory registrations and licenses across four jurisdictions: a VASP license from Dubai's VARA (awarded February 2024, operational approval received July 2024, one of the most comprehensive VASP licenses issued in Dubai covering broker-dealer, management/investment, and lending/borrowing for institutional and retail clients), Money Services Business registration with FinCEN (United States), Money Services Business and International Financial Mechanics registration with FINTRAC (Canada), and registration with Banco de España (Spain). Additional regulatory applications are in progress in other jurisdictions.

On the security certification side, Aquanow maintains ISO 27001:2022 certification for information security management and SOC 2 Type II certification for operational controls. The platform enforces MFA, IP whitelisting, environment separation, encryption at rest and in transit, address whitelisting for withdrawals, and segregated client custody accounts with bankruptcy-remote legal structures.

Track Record and Clients

Over seven years Aquanow has processed $130B+ in transaction volume for 300+ institutional clients across 50+ countries with 24/7 market access. Notable clients and partnerships include Emirates NBD (whose Liv X app launched crypto trading powered by Aquanow's infrastructure in March 2025), Visa (stablecoin settlement for CEMEA issuers and acquirers), Universal (end-to-end infrastructure for the UAE Central Bank-registered USDU stablecoin), PDAX (Philippine digital asset exchange), WonderFi (Canadian fintech), OYAK (Turkish conglomerate), and SGB (Bahrain's CBB-licensed digital bank). Aquanow also participated in the January 2026 launch of Lynq Network alongside GSR, Wintermute, DV Chain, and Nonco — one of the first firms to post off-exchange collateral via the institutional network.

The company has appeared on Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 and Technology Fast 500 lists, with 3,022% four-year revenue growth reported in 2024.

Aquanow's academic research arm, the UBC Aquanow DeFi Lab, is co-led by CTO Andy Leung and conducts blockchain and DeFi research in partnership with the University of British Columbia.