After Nearly a Decade, Gary Gensler's Poster Child for Crypto Compliance Executes Its First Trade

In brief

• Nearly a decade after its founding and raising $100 million, Prometheum has officially executed its first crypto trades.
• Co-CEO Aaron Kaplan argues the platform dovetails with the modernization of markets through tokenization.
• Prometheum’s launch arrives in a drastically altered regulatory climate, following Gary Gensler's departure as SEC chair.

After weathering years of industry skepticism and navigating a shifting regulatory landscape, Prometheum has executed its first crypto trades—aiming to prove its critics wrong by seamlessly integrating digital assets with traditional investments under a single regulatory roof.

The company, which has raised nearly $100 million since it was established nearly a decade ago, began providing access to crypto trading last week. While the service is currently limited to Ethereum, founder and co-CEO Aaron Kaplan said the firm expects to debut additional digital assets in the near future.

“We’ve just kept our heads down and kept moving forward,” Kaplan told Decrypt. “Our goal is to be able to service the broker‑dealer and [Registered Investment Advisor] channels and the major asset issuers, and I think that there's a lot of comfort.”

That comfort comes at a time when the rest of the market is looking elsewhere. While investors have flocked to vehicles like spot Bitcoin ETFs following their watershed 2024 debut, Prometheum’s long-awaited milestone went virtually unnoticed by the broader crypto sector.

The industry's indifference is rooted in a bitter feud. In 2023, Kaplan caught industry flak for testifying before U.S. lawmakers that the SEC had clearly laid out a path for compliance—essentially validating the aggressive enforcement tactics of then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler. While giants like Coinbase fought the regulator in court, Prometheum pressed forward with a business model that treated digital assets like Ethereum as securities.

At the time, onlookers mocked Prometheum’s lack of volume, comparing the firm's step-by-step approach to a “” or a “.”