Ouinex Featured in Forbes: The $9M Bet That Crypto Exchanges Should Belong to Traders
Publish date: 19 May 2026
Author of original article: Boaz Sobrado, Forbes Contributor, fintech entrepreneur.
Forbes does not cover every crypto exchange that raises money. When it does, it covers the ones making a structural argument worth examining.
On 19 May 2026, contributor Boaz Sobrado, a fintech entrepreneur and Forbes writer, published a piece on Ouinex that went straight to the thesis behind everything we have built.
His headline: “Fish In A Tank With Sharks.”
His argument is that the central limit order book running nearly every crypto exchange is structurally unfair to retail traders, and Ouinex was built to fix that.
"On the NYSE, only institutions trade against other institutions. In crypto, the order book is shared. A retail trader in a Starbucks with a phone competes on the same book as a market-making firm with 20 employees and a few million in capital." Boaz Sobrado, Forbes
That is the problem our No-CLOB model was built to solve. On Ouinex, market makers submit bid and ask prices but cannot see retail order flow and cannot position against it.
Our traders compete against the market and not against the house, and not against firms with structural visibility advantages over them.
Sobrado also drew the comparison that placed Ouinex within the broader landscape shift:
"The setup looks like a centralized Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid proved trader-owned exchanges can work on-chain. So is Ouinex, centralized and licensed." Boaz Sobrado, Forbes
The $9 million Ouinex has raised came entirely from retail and professional traders. No venture capital. No institutional agenda. More than 10,000 traders hold equity in the platform they trade on.
That model, traders as shareholders, is what Forbes examined, and what the article argues is the structural answer to a decade of misaligned exchange incentives.
- Read the full piece: Fish In A Tank With Sharks — Ouinex Hits $9M To Kill The Order Book.
- Understand the No-CLOB model: Read the breakdown
Trade on a platform where your order flow stays yours: Open your account
