Wintermute is a London-based proprietary trading firm that acts as an algorithmic market maker in digital asset markets. It quotes continuous two-sided prices on centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges, runs an over-the-counter desk offering spot, options, forwards and CFD execution, and provides programmatic liquidity through a direct API and an institutional access point called Node. The firm also works directly with token issuers and exchanges to help new tokens establish tradable markets and depth around listing. Its specialization is technology-driven, continuous liquidity provision rather than directional trading, built by a team whose background is in traditional electronic market making rather than crypto-native trading. It targets institutional counterparties, exchanges, token projects, brokers, hedge funds and qualifying high-net-worth individuals rather than retail traders, and structures custom OTC spot, options and forward trades alongside its exchange market-making, which it points to as a differentiator against narrower, single-venue liquidity providers. The firm was founded in London in 2017 by Evgeny Gaevoy (CEO), Harro Mantel (CTO) and Yoann Turpin (Head of Business Development), all three previously colleagues on Optiver's European ETF high-frequency trading desk. It raised a $2.8 million Series A in mid-2020 and a $20 million Series B in January 2021, both led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Pantera Capital and Avon Ventures, a fund affiliated with Fidelity's parent company FMR LLC; Bloomberg reported in July 2024 that Wintermute was separately in talks to raise $200 to $300 million, with Tencent among the prospective investors, at a valuation of about $2 billion, though the outcome of those talks was not confirmed in later reporting. Wintermute registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority for its OTC spot business in February 2022, after an application process of more than eighteen months, and holds a Major Payment Institution licence from Singapore's Monetary Authority for digital payment token services. In September 2022 the firm lost $160 million in stablecoins, bitcoin and other tokens in a hack of its decentralized finance operations linked to the Profanity vanity-address generator; it said its OTC and lending businesses were unaffected and that its remaining equity covered the loss several times over. Before the November 2022 collapse of FTX and Alameda Research, analytics firm Nansen had ranked Wintermute among the five largest crypto trading firms globally, and Forbes reported the firm generated $1.05 billion in revenue and $582 million in net profit in 2021. In 2026 Wintermute extended its market-making model beyond crypto: its OTC desk began quoting tokenized gold, in Pax Gold and Tether Gold, in February 2026; it launched over-the-counter WTI crude oil CFDs; and it started providing two-sided liquidity on event-contract prediction market venues including Polymarket and Kalshi as trading volume on those platforms passed $60 billion for the year. The firm has cited more than $3.5 trillion in annual trading volume across over 70 exchanges as of 2026.
