Most of the software running the global financial markets was never paid for. Not by the banks, not by the brokers, not by the hedge funds processing billions in daily volume. It was written by developers who published their work for free, maintained by small teams who kept showing up because the work mattered to them, and quietly adopted by an industry that moved on without looking back.

That arrangement is starting to crack.

EXANTE, a prime broker with $4 billion in client assets and 20,000+ professional investors on its platform, has put €1 million behind an effort to fix it. The Gecko Fund, launched in June 2026, is a grant program for open-source projects within the financial technology stack. Not new projects looking for seed funding. Existing ones. The libraries and frameworks already running in production at major institutions are maintained by people who have never seen a cent from the companies depending on them.

The numbers are uncomfortable

Open-source software powers roughly 70% of businesses worldwide. In financial services, the real figure is probably higher. Trading platforms, market data feeds, risk engines, API layers, order management systems — most of them are built on top of components that nobody owns and few people fund.

The Harvard Business School estimated the demand-side value of open-source at $8.8 trillion globally. On the supply side, 63% of maintainers of widely used projects lack adequate funding. Two different realities, living in the same ecosystem, and the industry has mostly chosen not to look at the gap between them.

AI is making that gap harder to ignore. The same tools accelerating software development are also accelerating vulnerability discovery. A poorly maintained library with a known flaw is a faster target than it was three years ago. Supply chain attacks on open-source dependencies have become a real and recurring problem, not a theoretical one.

Who actually maintains this stuff

Gecko Fund's first grant went to Kryo, a Java serialization framework that has been in active use since 2009. It is widely used in high-performance data processing and trading environments. Until June 2026, it had never received outside funding. Two people, across two continents, kept it running.

"Critical open-source work often happens quietly, even as major industries depend on it," said Nathan Sweet, creator of Kryo. "Kryo has been maintained as a passion project since 2009, with 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."

That last line is the point. The dependence is real, and it has not been reciprocal. Kryo is not an edge case. It is a representative example of how the open-source ecosystem actually works: projects that become load-bearing infrastructure for entire industries, maintained by people who receive nothing in return.

Why a broker is doing this

EXANTE built its platform on open-source. Richard Forss, the company's Chief Technology Officer, put the number plainly: nearly 70% of EXANTE's critical technology stack runs on it.

"Open-source infrastructure is not a charity case," Forss said. "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."

Anatoly Knyazev, co-founder of EXANTE and founder of Gecko Fund, framed the motivation as straightforward: "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. We believe the industry that benefits from these tools should play a role in sustaining them."

Grants range from €10,000 to €150,000 and are reviewed quarterly. The fund prioritizes projects across Erlang/OTP, Scala, Java/JVM, and JavaScript, as well as developer tooling and infrastructure libraries relevant to the financial ecosystem. Applications are open at geckofund.org.

The financial industry has spent years treating open-source as a free resource. Gecko Fund is a bet that the smarter move is to treat it like infrastructure, which means paying to maintain it.