London-based Wintermute is making a dramatic strategic shift, planning to invest $1 billion over five years in high-frequency trading and AI infrastructure to expand beyond crypto markets. According to a Bloomberg report citing founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy, the firm aims for non-crypto markets to drive over 50% of revenue by 2027, up from just 10% currently. The privately held company expects to fund this spending through retained earnings, as it reportedly was profitable in 2025 and expects to remain so this year. Wintermute recorded $582 million in profit during the 2021 crypto bull market, as reported by Forbes.
The strategic pivot comes as Wintermute's crypto trading volumes have declined significantly. The firm's average daily trading volume fell to about $10 billion this year from $15 billion in 2025, as bitcoin declined to roughly half its October peak above $126,000. However, institutions have shown increased interest, accounting for a record 72% of spot trading volume on its over-the-counter desk in the first half of 2026. The company has already begun diversifying its offerings, starting to trade exchange-traded funds and perpetual futures tied to real-world assets in 2025, and adding 24-hour exposure to West Texas Intermediate crude in March. It also opened a prediction-markets desk in early 2026.
On August 6, 2026, Wintermute USA LLC registered as a broker dealer with the Securities and Exchange Commission and joined the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. According to reports from CoinDesk, this registration allows the firm to trade traditional equities and equity options on U.S. national securities exchanges, act as an authorized participant for exchange traded products including crypto ETPs, and self clear digital asset securities transactions. The firm facilitates over ₹10 billion in average daily trading volume across more than 60 centralized and decentralized exchanges globally, making it one of the largest liquidity providers in crypto markets. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the broker-dealer registration will help Wintermute gain access to market-making functions on major U.S. exchanges like the Nasdaq National Security Marketplace and the New York Stock Exchange, which allow market makers to maintain market liquidity in specific securities.
The $1 billion investment will help Wintermute compete with established players including Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and XTX Markets. XTX, which trades more than $250 billion a day, announced plans last year to spend €1 billion, or about $1.15 billion, on five data centers in Finland. Jane Street is also preparing to build and finance its own data center. Wintermute will use the infrastructure to train quantitative models on large volumes of market data and increase its computing, storage and networking capacity. According to Bloomberg, competing in traditional markets requires more than reducing execution times by microseconds, emphasizing the firm's focus on sophisticated AI-powered trading capabilities.
Despite the potential opportunity in traditional securities, regulation remains one of the biggest variables for Wintermute's expansion. The company's broker-dealer status does not automatically mean it can immediately launch or trade every form of tokenized security. Each product must comply with applicable securities laws and regulatory requirements. The SEC has continued to examine how existing securities rules apply to digital assets and blockchain-based financial products. For companies such as Wintermute, greater regulatory clarity could provide an important catalyst. Without regulatory clarity, tokenized securities may continue to develop more slowly. With clearer rules, however, the market could potentially expand much faster. Wintermute has previously engaged with regulators on issues involving tokenized securities, in a submission to the SEC's Crypto Task Force discussing the ability of broker-dealers to trade tokenized securities for their own accounts, as well as questions surrounding self-clearing, settlement and custody.
