Wintermute to Invest $1 Billion Over Five Years in AI, HFT Buildout

Global crypto market maker Wintermute plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years in AI data centers and high-frequency trading infrastructure as it expands into traditional finance.

Chief Executive Officer Evgeny Gaevoy told Bloomberg on August 12 that Wintermute now has to compete with firms that have spent decades optimizing their technology and infrastructure, requiring a sizable investment.

The company said the spending is intended to turn Wintermute into a full-service dealer across equities, commodities and foreign exchange, similar to Wall Street trading firms such as Citadel Securities and Jane Street. It also wants to raise the share of revenue from non-crypto businesses to more than 50% by the end of next year from about 10% now.

The effort is about more than shaving microseconds off execution times, Gaevoy said. The key is to continuously train sophisticated quantitative models on vast amounts of market data while securing the computing, storage and network capacity to support them.

Wintermute's push into traditional finance comes as the crypto bear market persists. Bitcoin was trading in the upper-$63,000 range on August 12, about half the record $126,000 it reached in October last year. Wintermute's average daily trading volume has fallen to about $10 billion this year from about $15 billion last year.

Wintermute has already been taking steps to enter traditional finance. Its U.S. unit recently completed broker-dealer registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. That registration allows the firm to trade stocks and equity options and provide liquidity on exchanges and in over-the-counter markets.