Investing.com — Marex Group (NASDAQ: MRX) plans to begin accepting Bitcoin and Ethereum as initial margin collateral for derivatives later this year, extending its stablecoin program announced last month, Investing.com has learned.
The firm announced in mid-July that clients would be able to post USDC, the dollar-denominated stablecoin issued by Circle, as initial margin, in what it described as the first stablecoin-powered initial margin transaction.
The debut trade was executed with Prime Trading LLC, with Coinbase providing custody, fiat conversion and reporting infrastructure.
“Yes, we are planning to accept BTC and ETH later this year,” Stephen Hood, head of clearing, Americas at Marex, told Investing.com. “This expansion would be on a limited roll-out until we have the ability to pledge it to exchanges and clearinghouses.”
That first USDC transaction was tightly bounded. “Since this was a one-day event, we limited the large transition to 10 mm,” Hood said. While not specifying what the limit would rise to, he did add that it “will, of course, change in October.”
Hood also noted that demand for the capability has come from across the client base, stating that it originated with “hedge funds, market makers, U.S. Treasury cash investors, and decentralized finance (DeFi) entities.”
The program follows a no-action letter issued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in December 2025, which permits futures commission merchants to accept non-securities digital assets (including USDC, Bitcoin and Ethereum) as customer margin collateral for CFTC-regulated derivatives, uncer certain conditions.
On risk management, Hood highlighted that Marex has built a framework combining risk governance, institutional custody and operating procedures covering eligibility criteria, wallet governance, transaction approvals and cybersecurity, with USDC collateral managed under the same enterprise risk standards applied across the firm’s traditional markets business.
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