On OTC, ChainPal is the counterparty. Not a router that shops your order across a handful of liquidity venues and takes a spread for the introduction, and not a matchmaker pairing you with someone else’s flow. When you ask us for a price to convert between currencies, you are asking us, and we are the one on the other side of the trade.
That single fact is what makes the rest of the desk possible to explain simply, because there is exactly one pricing question to answer: how does ChainPal decide what price to offer.
The auto-quote ceiling
Under the auto-quote ceiling, a request gets priced instantly by the desk’s own pricing engine and returned as a firm quote, no person involved. Above that ceiling, a dealer prices the ticket by hand.
The ceiling is not an arbitrary number. It is set at the size where automated pricing stops being a reasonable substitute for a person actually looking at the size of the trade, current market depth, and what it will take to lay off that position responsibly. Below it, the math is well understood and repeatable enough that a human in the loop would only add latency, not judgement. Above it, the opposite is true.
What a firm quote actually buys you
An instant quote is held firm for ten minutes once it is issued, and a dealer-priced quote for thirty, because a larger ticket usually needs more people to sign off on it. That window exists so a business can actually act on a price rather than treat it as an estimate. There is no fifteen-second countdown forcing a decision before you have had a chance to check the number against your own books, and no retrading the price after you have already committed to moving funds.
Firm also means firm in both directions. The rate you are quoted is the rate you receive, not a rate subject to slippage once your order actually executes, because there is no order book for it to slip against in the first place.
Why a dealer, and not just a bigger algorithm
It would be simpler for us to just raise the auto-quote ceiling and let the algorithm handle everything. We have not done that, on purpose. A six-figure conversion carries a different kind of risk than a four-figure one, not just a bigger number attached to the same risk. A dealer pricing that ticket by hand can account for things an automated engine is not positioned to weigh in the moment: how a position that size will actually be laid off, what it does to short-term liquidity, and whether the standard formula still makes sense for this specific trade.
Above the ceiling, you are not waiting because the system is slow. You are waiting because a person is doing the part of the job that is supposed to take a person.
Settlement, not a routing fee
Because ChainPal is the counterparty, settlement is direct. Gross fiat or on-chain settlement, dispatched to the destination you named, with no routing fee sitting between the price you were quoted and the amount that actually lands. The price you agreed to at the start of the window is the price reflected in what you receive at the end of it.