Joshua Frank runs The Tie, a New York company that has quietly become one of the most relied-upon data providers on the professional side of cryptocurrency. Its terminal and APIs feed real-time sentiment, news, and market data to the funds and desks that trade digital assets for a living.
Walk into a crypto trading desk at a hedge fund or a bank, and there is a decent chance a screen in the room is powered by The Tie. The company Frank co-founded sells the layer beneath the trade: the sentiment readings, the news flow, the on-chain and market data that professional investors use to decide what to do. Its flagship product, the SigDev Terminal, is pitched as an institutional-grade workstation for digital asset investors, and interviewers have taken to calling the whole thing "the Bloomberg of crypto."
That framing suits Frank's ambition. The Tie is not built for the retail trader chasing the next token. It is built for the roughly 100-plus hedge funds, market makers, banks, and exchanges that make up its client base - institutions that need clean, credible data in a market famous for having very little of it. The company employs around 48 people, is headquartered at 41 W 25th St in Manhattan, and raised a $9 million Series A in early 2022.
The 2018 leap
Frank did not arrive from a crypto-native background. He studied at McGill University and then worked as a consultant at SS&C Technologies, where he helped develop post-trade settlement operations for custodians, brokers, and asset managers. It was the plumbing of traditional finance - unglamorous, exacting work that taught him what institutions actually need from their data.
In March 2018, he left. Crypto at the time was still widely dismissed, and building a data company for it meant betting that serious money would eventually show up and demand serious tools. Frank made that bet full time, and the timing turned out to be early rather than wrong.
Twitter sentiment is one of the most powerful predictors of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices.
Joshua FrankBetting on sentiment
The founding insight was simple and slightly heretical: in crypto, mood moves markets more than fundamentals do. Frank has argued that sentiment is "one of, if not the largest, mover of asset prices" in digital assets. The Tie's early work turned the noise of crypto Twitter into a structured, quantifiable signal - a "wisdom of the crowd" approach that gave traders something they could actually measure.
What separated the company from the crowd of crypto commentators was rigor. Rather than talking up tokens, The Tie built its reputation partly by exposing bad data. An early report alleged that roughly 90% of cryptocurrency exchanges were reporting inflated trading volume. The claim was pointed enough that Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal picked it up, and it put a young, unglamorous data company on the institutional map.
Quiet growth
Over the course of 2020 - a year that swung from crash to boom - The Tie quadrupled its headcount and moved into profitability. That is an unusual sentence to write about a crypto startup, and it reflects a deliberate choice: build infrastructure that gets used in every kind of market, up or down. Data does not care whether Bitcoin is rallying or bleeding; the desks need it either way.
Frank has kept the company low on hype and high on utility. He shows up at industry events - a speaker slot at Paris Blockchain Week 2025, appearances on finance and crypto podcasts - but the pitch is consistent: The Tie is, in his framing, "the most comprehensive place to get data and analysis in crypto." The goal is not to be loud. It is to be the default.
In the digital assets market, sentiment is one of, if not the largest, mover of asset prices.
Joshua FrankWhat comes next
The through-line of Frank's work is a wager that crypto keeps professionalizing - that more banks, more funds, and more traditional institutions keep wading in, and that all of them need a trustworthy data layer to do it. The Tie has spent years positioning itself to be that layer, adding partnerships and expanding its terminal and API business as the institutional side of the market matures.
It is a patient thesis, built on infrastructure rather than headlines. If Frank is right, the companies that matter most in crypto will not always be the ones people tweet about. Some of them will be the quiet ones supplying the data that everyone else trades on.