BridgePort's AI 'Bridget' Aims to Unify Crypto's Fragmented Markets

NEW YORK, NY – January 15, 2026 – BridgePort, a key infrastructure provider in the institutional crypto space, today unveiled an ambitious expansion of its services with the launch of BridgePort Analytics. The new platform features an AI-powered agent named 'Bridget,' designed to provide institutional traders with critical intelligence to navigate the notoriously fragmented digital asset markets. This move signals a strategic evolution for the firm, moving beyond its core function as a settlement coordinator to become a comprehensive data and analytics provider.

In a market where liquidity is scattered across hundreds of exchanges, each with its own unique characteristics, institutional players face significant challenges in achieving efficient execution and managing capital. BridgePort's new offering aims to directly address this by synthesizing vast amounts of market data into actionable insights, accessible through a simple, natural-language interface.

The Post-FTX Imperative: Solving Crypto's Counterparty Risk

The launch arrives at a pivotal moment for institutional crypto. The collapse of major exchanges like FTX sent shockwaves through the industry, underscoring the immense counterparty risk associated with pre-funding accounts—the practice of parking large sums of capital directly on trading venues. In the aftermath, the demand for Off-Exchange Settlement (OES) solutions has surged as institutions seek to separate their trading activities from asset custody.

OES platforms act as a crucial coordination layer, allowing firms to keep their assets with a regulated, third-party custodian while still being able to deploy that capital for trading across multiple exchanges. This structure not only drastically reduces exposure to exchange failure but also enhances capital efficiency. Instead of maintaining separate, idle pools of capital on dozens of venues, institutions can use a single pool of collateral managed by a custodian, allocating it digitally and in real-time wherever opportunities arise. This model, common in traditional markets like foreign exchange, is seen by many as essential for the maturation of crypto's market structure.

BridgePort has already established itself as a key player in this domain, providing the agnostic middleware that connects custodians, trading firms, and exchanges. Its infrastructure facilitates secure messaging for pre-order credit checks and post-trade settlement, effectively creating the plumbing necessary for a safer institutional trading environment. This foundation is critical for understanding the significance of its latest move into analytics.

From Plumbing to Intelligence: A New Layer of Analytics

While OES infrastructure solves the problem of how to move capital securely and efficiently, it doesn't answer the question of where and when to deploy it for optimal results. This is the gap BridgePort Analytics and its AI assistant, Bridget, are designed to fill.

The platform provides an independent, data-driven view into how exchanges actually perform under real-world conditions. It analyzes key execution quality metrics such as bid-ask spreads, trade slippage, order book depth, and market fragmentation. Powered by what the company describes as institutional-grade data feeds covering over 400 global exchanges and nearly one million trading symbols, the system ingests a torrent of real-time and historical data to build its intelligence layer.

"As more trading moves to OES, institutions need a clear understanding of how each venue performs under real conditions," said Nirup Ramalingam, CEO of BridgePort, in the company's announcement. "BridgePort Analytics gives firms objective execution-quality data they can use to allocate credit, build routing logic, and manage settlement risk across venues."

The introduction of 'Bridget' makes this powerful dataset accessible to a wider audience within trading firms. Instead of relying on specialized data scientists or expensive tooling, traders can ask natural-language questions like, "Which exchange has the best liquidity for a 100 BTC-USDT trade right now?" or "Show me the average slippage on Coinbase versus Kraken for large ETH orders over the past week." This democratization of data analysis is aimed at enabling faster, more precise decision-making on the trading floor.

Building an Institutional Ecosystem

BridgePort's strategic expansion is bolstered by significant backing and a growing network of high-profile partners, lending credibility to its ambitions. The company's seed funding round was supported by a blend of crypto-native and traditional finance heavyweights, including market-making giant Virtu Financial, XBTO, and Further Ventures. This diverse support underscores the broad appeal of solutions that bridge the gap between traditional financial standards and the innovative, yet chaotic, world of digital assets.

More importantly, the firm has secured key integrations that demonstrate real-world adoption of its technology. In a significant move, institutional crypto platform Anchorage Digital selected BridgePort to provide the coordination layer for its Atlas Network, enabling clients to access execution venues with greater capital efficiency. Furthermore, BridgePort's technology is the engine behind AnchorNote, a custody-native pledging solution launched by Crypto Finance, a part of the Deutsche Börse Group. These partnerships with regulated, institutional-grade players signal that BridgePort's infrastructure is becoming a trusted component of the evolving digital asset landscape.

By layering an intelligence platform on top of its established settlement network, the company is creating a powerful, self-reinforcing ecosystem. Clients using its OES middleware are natural customers for its analytics, as the insights directly inform how to best utilize the settlement network. This creates a sticky product suite that addresses multiple institutional pain points simultaneously.

A Unified Vision for a Fractured Market

The ultimate goal, as articulated by BridgePort's leadership, is to fundamentally simplify the institutional crypto trading experience. The fragmentation of the market has historically forced traders into complex, siloed workflows for each exchange they use, increasing operational overhead and risk.

"We're working to make many markets behave like one market," stated Steven Bartfield, BridgePort's Chief Product Officer. He explained that while OES shifts settlement risk away from venues and pledging enables capital allocation without pre-funding, the new analytics platform provides the final piece of the puzzle: "a unified layer of execution intelligence and venue behavior so capital can be deployed with far greater precision across markets."

This holistic approach—combining secure infrastructure with AI-driven intelligence—represents a significant step forward in the institutionalization of crypto. It addresses the core demands of large financial players: risk mitigation, capital efficiency, and data-driven decision-making. As tools like BridgePort Analytics become more widespread, they help level the playing field, reduce informational asymmetries, and foster a more stable and liquid global market. This evolution is a clear indicator that the digital asset class is continuing its inexorable march toward maturity, adopting the sophisticated infrastructure that defines traditional financial systems.