Wintermute

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Wintermute
Founded	2017
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Key People	Evgeny Gaevoy, chief executive officer; Marina Gurevich, chief operating officer; Nalaka Gamage, chief financial officer; Valentine Samko, chief technology officer; Yoann Turpin, co-founder
Employees	Approx. 85-100
Products	Algorithmic market making, over-the-counter (OTC) spot and derivatives trading, Wintermute NODE platform, contracts for difference (CFDs), venture investments
Twitter	@https://x.com/wintermute_t
LinkedIn	Profile
Website	https://www.wintermute.com/
Releases	Company News
Blog	https://www.wintermute.com/insights

Wintermute is an algorithmic trading firm and digital asset market maker that provides liquidity across centralized, decentralized, and over-the-counter cryptocurrency markets.

The company deploys proprietary quantitative trading strategies and high-frequency algorithms to facilitate continuous trading, narrow bid-ask spreads, and support secondary market efficiency for hundreds of digital tokens. Through its over-the-counter desk, proprietary execution technology, and venture incubation initiatives, the firm acts as an intermediary connecting traditional institutions, crypto-native ventures, and decentralized protocols across the broader financial ecosystem.

History

Wintermute was founded in July 2017 in London by Evgeny Gaevoy, Harro Mantel, and Yoann Turpin. Prior to creating the venture, Gaevoy spent nearly a decade at Dutch algorithmic market-making firm Optiver, where he ran its European exchange-traded fund business across high-frequency trading and over-the-counter desks. During the cryptocurrency market expansion of 2017 and the subsequent contraction in 2018, the founders sought to adapt conventional proprietary trading principles and quantitative market-making frameworks to emergent blockchain venues.

In July 2020, the firm raised $2.8 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Blockchain.com Ventures. The capital infusion supported technological expansion into automated market making on decentralized finance protocols and expanded electronic market connectivity across spot centralized exchanges. Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed, and Samuel Harrison, a partner at Blockchain.com Ventures, joined the board of directors following the transaction.

In January 2021, the company closed a $20 million Series B funding round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pantera Capital, with additional backing from Sino Global Capital, Kenetic Capital, and Avon Ventures. The company deployed this capital toward building institutional derivatives infrastructure, launching dedicated over-the-counter services, and establishing a presence in Asia. Over the course of 2021, rapid digital asset trading expansion propelled the firm to $1.5 trillion in annual trading volume, generating $1.05 billion in revenue and $582 million in net profit.

As digital asset markets entered a liquidity contraction in 2022, the company maintained continuous liquidity provision across centralized and decentralized venues while navigating broader sector disruptions, including the insolvencies of major centralized lending and trading platforms. In 2023, the firm expanded its operational hub in Singapore under co-founder Yoann Turpin, positioning resources to capture growing institutional demand across the Asia-Pacific region. By 2025 and 2026, the company further diversified operations by opening an office in New York, expanding into traditional market infrastructure, and developing multi-asset algorithmic capabilities.

Products and Services

The firm's primary operational focus is proprietary algorithmic market making, providing continuous liquidity across centralized exchanges, automated market makers, and decentralized protocols. Operating on high-speed venues, its systems interact with order books governed by time/price priority and automated match engine architectures. By quoting two-sided prices across spot and derivatives markets, the firm absorbs order flow imbalances and enhances price discovery for bitcoin and a wide spectrum of alternative cryptocurrencies.

In over-the-counter markets, the firm operates Wintermute NODE, an electronic platform and application programming interface launched in April 2022. NODE enables qualified counterparties and institutional investors to execute bilaterally negotiated transactions in spot tokens as well as cleared derivatives, including contracts for difference (CFDs), vanilla options, and customized swaps. The platform facilitates multi-asset collateral management and flexible margin configurations, supporting customized order execution without dislocating public exchange order books.

Wintermute also provides specialized market-making arrangements and programmatic token liquidity for protocol issuers, foundations, and Web3 projects. These arrangements assist new digital networks in establishing liquid secondary trading environments, mitigating price volatility, and supporting orderly token distribution upon launch. Complementing its trading services, the firm operates Wintermute Ventures, an investment initiative that provides early-stage equity and token financing, advisory resources, and ecosystem guidance to decentralized applications, infrastructure protocols, and financial technology startups.

Key Users

The primary users and counterparties of the firm's trading products and institutional services include institutional investors, asset managers, crypto-native hedge funds, private banks, protocol foundations, and professional proprietary trading firms.

Key People

Board of Directors

• Evgeny Gaevoy, Director and Chief Executive Officer
• Marina Gurevich, Director and Chief Operating Officer

Executive Management

• Evgeny Gaevoy, Chief Executive Officer
• Marina Gurevich, Chief Operating Officer
• Nalaka Gamage, Chief Financial Officer
• Valentine Samko, Chief Technology Officer
• Morgan Vincent, Head of Trading
• Yoann Turpin, Co-founder
• Jonathan Chan, Global Head of Business Development and Partnerships
• Alain Passini, Head of Risk
• Lilian Tan, Chief Compliance Officer

Risk Management

The firm's operational structure incorporates continuous algorithmic risk controls designed to mitigate adverse selection, inventory imbalances, latency exposure, and systemic counterparty failure. Proprietary quantitative risk engines monitor trading limits, capital utilization, and net position exposures across venues in real time, automatically reducing quoting sizes or pausing automated strategies during periods of extreme volatility. To safeguard against settlement failures and credit defaults in bilateral trading, the firm enforces stringent counterparty onboarding and margin requirements while minimizing unhedged inventory on non-cleared venues.

In regulatory compliance, the firm's United Kingdom operating entity, Wintermute Trading Ltd, is registered as a cryptoasset firm with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017. The firm maintains internal frameworks designed to ensure comprehensive compliance with anti-money laundering mandates, know-your-customer procedures, and global sanctions regimes across jurisdictions, while conducting ongoing monitoring of transactional counterparty wallets.

Controversies

In June 2022, an operational incident occurred while providing liquidity for the Optimism Layer 2 blockchain project. Wintermute provided the Optimism Foundation with an Ethereum Layer 1 multisignature wallet address that had not yet been deployed to the Optimism Layer 2 network. An external attacker deployed the contract on Layer 2 before Wintermute completed the deployment procedure, seizing 20 million OP governance tokens valued at approximately $15 million. Wintermute accepted full financial responsibility for the error, bought back tokens from the open market to maintain market stability, and fully covered the financial deficit without client losses, after which the exploiter subsequently returned 17 million tokens.

On September 20, 2022, the firm suffered an external cyberattack targeting its decentralized finance trading operation, resulting in the theft of approximately $160 million in various digital tokens across 90 different assets. Independent blockchain security audits revealed that the intrusion compromised a private key corresponding to an internal admin wallet generated using Profanity, an open-source vanity address generator that contained a cryptographic vulnerability. The company's centralized trading and over-the-counter operations were unaffected, the firm remained solvent with sufficient capital reserves, and it absorbed the loss without customer insolvency or disruption to market-making obligations.

In June 2023, creditors of insolvent crypto lender Celsius Network amended a class-action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, naming Wintermute Trading Ltd as a co-defendant alongside former Celsius executives. The plaintiffs alleged that Wintermute engaged in wash trading and market manipulation involving the Celsius native token (CEL) before Celsius's bankruptcy filing in July 2022. Wintermute vigorously denied the allegations, stating that all trading activity was conducted transparently on arms-length commercial terms, and engaged legal counsel to defend against the claims.

In November 2023, a commercial dispute emerged between Wintermute and the NEAR Foundation, along with Aurora Labs, over the redemption of $11.2 million worth of USN, an algorithmic stablecoin that had previously depegged. Wintermute had purchased the stablecoin from the liquidation estate of FTX and sought full redemption from the USN Protection Programme established by the foundation. After the foundation refused to complete the conversion, citing concerns about the transaction and source of funds, Gaevoy publicly criticized the decision and said the firm was exploring formal legal remedies to enforce contractual commitments.