Announcing: Five Bells Settlement
"The Bitcoin OTC market moves trillions of dollars annually, but it still settles like it's 2013—through Telegram messages, spreadsheets, and trust. We're changing that." – Brian Langel, Co-Founder
When institutional capital enters Bitcoin markets, it expects the same operational standards it relies on in traditional finance: real-time trade matching, auditable workflows, and settlement without counterparty risk. Today, that infrastructure doesn't exist. Firms are forced to choose between fragmented manual processes or centralized custody solutions that introduce new risks.
Five Bells Settlement is building the missing layer.
We're proud to announce ego death capital's investment in Five Bells Settlement (FBS), leading a bridge round that will enable the company to scale the institutional post-trade infrastructure Bitcoin markets urgently need.
The Founders
Founders Brian Langel and Anthony Magliacca have set out to solve a problem they experienced first hand while working for NYDIG, a Bitcoin and digital assets company that provides institutional-grade custody, trading, and financial services..
Brian served as CTO and Head of Custody at NYDIG, where he built secure systems handling billions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Before that, he co-founded Dash, an automobile data analytics company, and taught computer science at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering for six years. He combines deep technical expertise with a practitioner's understanding of what institutional systems require.
Anthony led Operations and Asset Servicing at NYDIG after holding critical roles at Two Sigma and Millennium, where he managed FX operations and post-trade workflows for some of the most demanding trading desks in the world. He knows exactly where manual processes break down and what it takes to build infrastructure that scales.
The team also includes Matt Siano, who served as Global General Counsel at Two Sigma for nearly two decades, and Matt Leon, former custody team lead at NYDIG.
The Problem
Bitcoin's OTC market processes an estimated $5-10 trillion in annual trading volume, yet post-trade settlement remains dangerously manual and operationally fragile. Trades are confirmed through messaging apps. Settlement instructions are coordinated via email. There is no standardized delivery-versus-payment (DvP), exposing counterparties to Herstatt risk, where one side fulfills its obligation while the other delays or defaults.
Institutional desks respond by hiring entire operations teams to manually monitor settlement legs, reconcile spreadsheets, and chase confirmations. A single mid-level operations hire in New York can cost $200,000 annually. Multiply that across dozens of trading firms, and the inefficiency becomes staggering.
Traditional finance solved this decades ago with clearinghouses and atomic settlement systems. Bitcoin markets have not—until now.
The Solution
Five Bells Settlement provides custody-agnostic, non-custodial infrastructure for institutional Bitcoin trading. It enables true delivery-versus-payment by coordinating atomic settlement across Bitcoin and fiat legs, ensuring both sides of a trade settle simultaneously or not at all.
The platform combines Bitcoin-native cryptographic tools—including Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs) and adaptor signatures—with API integrations to banks and custodians. This creates programmable, auditable workflows that eliminate the need for escrow, margin, or centralized clearinghouses.
Institutions can use Five Bells without changing custodians, without moving funds to a new platform, and without introducing new trust assumptions. The system works with their existing infrastructure while delivering automation and risk reduction that current workflows cannot provide.
Why Now
The timing for institutional Bitcoin infrastructure has never been clearer. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have unlocked a new wave of participation from asset managers, hedge funds, and broker-dealers. Regulatory clarity in the United States has given institutions the confidence to allocate, but the operational tooling has not kept pace.
These firms are bringing expectations shaped by decades in traditional markets: compliance-ready workflows, real-time transparency, and risk-managed settlement. The current Bitcoin OTC infrastructure cannot deliver on those expectations.
Five Bells is arriving at the exact moment when institutional demand is accelerating but the necessary infrastructure does not yet exist. Every institution entering Bitcoin will need post-trade systems that meet TradFi standards. FBS is defining those standards.
Bitcoin's success as a global reserve asset depends on infrastructure that works at institutional scale. Five Bells is building that infrastructure with precision, integrity, and a deep respect for what Bitcoin represents: a trust-minimized, open financial system that does not compromise on security or operational rigor.
We're honored to support the team as they scale the post-trade layer Bitcoin needs.
Follow Five Bells at https://www.fivebellssettlement.com/ and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/five-bells-settlement/.
Bitcoin deserves financial infrastructure that matches its importance. Five Bells is delivering it.
– ego death capital
