EXANTE, a global prime broker and institutional trading infrastructure provider, has unveiled the Gecko Fund, a €1m grant programme aimed at bolstering the open-source software projects that underpin trading and financial data systems worldwide.
The initiative will channel direct financial support to the developers and teams maintaining critical but chronically underfunded open-source components, including APIs, single-maintainer libraries and core building blocks of global trading infrastructure.
The fund has already disbursed its first award, €10,000 to Kryo, an open-source Java serialisation framework widely deployed in high-performance data processing and trading environments. Individual grants range from €10,000 to €150,000, depending on a project’s scope and overall impact, and applications are reviewed on a quarterly basis.
The programme was established in response to a deepening structural imbalance within the open-source ecosystem. Despite open-source software generating an estimated $8.8tn in demand-side value, around 63% of maintainers working on widely adopted projects operate without sufficient funding, it said. This gap creates invisible dependencies for businesses, exposing them to cybersecurity risks, supply chain vulnerabilities and operational disruptions. Those risks are being compounded by artificial intelligence, which is speeding up how quickly threat actors can identify and exploit weaknesses in shared infrastructure.
EXANTE says eligibility is open to individuals, project teams, communities and organisations. The fund will concentrate on established open-source technologies in Erlang/OTP, Scala, Java/JVM, JavaScript, developer tooling and core infrastructure libraries, though projects outside those categories that play a meaningful role in the financial ecosystem may also be considered. Applications are assessed against criteria including adoption levels, relevance to financial markets, existing funding and the expected impact of additional support.
EXANTE, founded in 2011, provides institutional-grade trading technology giving professional investors direct access to global financial markets through a single platform. It offers exposure to more than two million financial instruments across 50-plus markets, spanning equities, ETFs, bonds, futures, options, currencies and metals, and serves over 20,000 professional investors from more than 100 countries, with in excess of $4bn in client assets on the platform.
EXANTE founder of Gecko Fund and co-founder Anatoly Knyazev said, “When we started building EXANTE more than fifteen years ago, open-source software made it possible to move quickly and solve problems that would otherwise have been out of reach.
“Our goal is not simply to fund software. It is to strengthen the communities and maintainers behind the infrastructure that modern finance depends on every day. We believe the industry that benefits from these tools should play a role in sustaining them.”
Kryo creator Nathan Sweet said, “Critical open-source work often happens quietly, even as major industries depend on it. Kryo has been maintained as a passion project since 2009, wi by th no outside funding — just two people across two continents who believed the work was worth doing. We are grateful to EXANTE and Gecko Fund for making that dependence reciprocal.”
EXANTE chief technology officer Richard Forss said, “Nearly 70% of our critical technology stack relies on open-source software — and we’re far from alone. Open-source infrastructure is not a charity case. It is load-bearing technology that underpins modern businesses, financial markets, and critical services worldwide. Gecko Fund is our way of helping ensure that this infrastructure remains resilient, secure, and sustainable.”
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