Wintermute

Wintermute is a proprietary trading firm: it buys and sells crypto assets with its own money, using high-frequency algorithms, and earns from spreads and price moves. Around that core it runs an OTC desk for spot and derivative products, a liquidity business for token issuers, a venture arm that invests in early DeFi protocols, and a team that incubates projects and takes part in DAO governance.

Its company page says it was founded in 2017 and works from offices in London, New York and Singapore. Evgeny Gaevoy, who built and ran Optiver's European ETF business before starting Wintermute, is founder and CEO; Yoann Turpin, a former Optiver high-frequency trader, is listed as co-founder. The executive team shown includes Marina Gurevich (COO), Valentine Samko (CTO) and Morgan Vincent (head of trading).

Wintermute is privately held and does not publish accounts. Its headline figure is trading volume: in August 2026 it said the group handles over $10 billion a day on average across more than 60 centralized and decentralized exchanges. That is turnover, not assets under management.

For a token project, Wintermute offers to quote the token on exchanges, aggregators and retail brokers around the clock, and gives partners a dashboard tracking liquidity by pair and venue. Its liquidity page carries testimonials from Pyth's Douro Labs, Stacks and SKALE; the dashboard data itself is not public.

The commercial structure is usually a token loan. A public example is Index Coop's IIP-83 proposal of September 2021: Index Coop would lend Wintermute 100,000 INDEX, 1% of supply, for one year. At the end Wintermute could return the tokens, or pay $5 million if INDEX had listed on a tier-one exchange with its help, or $7.5 million otherwise. That gives Wintermute an option on the tokens. The proposal set inventory commitments but no reporting duty, and the forum page links a Snapshot vote without showing a result. For how this record compares with other liquidity managers, see how Wintermute compares with other treasury and liquidity managers.

Wintermute's website adds a caveat that matters for anyone reading its marketing: it says references to market making or liquidity provision on its site do not refer to regulated market-making services, and that no communication from it establishes a customer relationship.

Wintermute is an active delegate and contributor in several DAOs, which is why its name comes up next to protocols whose tokens it also trades. Its governance page says it wrote the first Pyth DAO constitution proposal, served on the council of Arbitrum's Long-Term Incentive Program screening a 35 million ARB distribution, proposed a delegation programme for Uniswap DAO, and supported dYdX governance by helping redesign its reward structure to attract liquidity partners. It also says it sits on large DAO multisigs that hold treasury funds and oversee contract upgrades.

That dual role, trading a token while helping set the incentives paid to liquidity providers on the same protocol, is a conflict readers should weigh, even where the proposals and votes are public.

Wintermute's footer is unusually direct. Wintermute Trading Ltd. is registered with the FCA for cryptoasset activities under the Money Laundering Regulations (FRN 928764), which is an anti-money-laundering registration, not a licence. Wintermute Asia Pte. Ltd. is incorporated in Singapore and mainly trades crypto derivatives. The site states that neither entity is authorised or regulated by any regulatory authority, so counterparties have no compensation or ombudsman scheme to fall back on.

Both entities trade only for their own account and say they do not hold cryptoassets or fiat for anyone else. In August 2026 an affiliate, Wintermute USA LLC in New York, registered as a broker-dealer with the SEC and joined FINRA; it does proprietary trading and acts as an authorized participant for exchange-traded products, for its own account only.

Wintermute has had two large losses, both of its own funds.

• June 2022: Wintermute was to receive 20 million OP from the Optimism Foundation for market making, but gave the address of an Ethereum multisig it had not deployed on Optimism. An attacker replayed the deployment, took control of the address and the tokens, then worth about $27.6 million. Rekt later wrote that the exploiter returned most of the funds.
• September 2022: a hot wallet whose vanity address was likely generated with the flawed Profanity tool was compromised and used to drain Wintermute's DeFi vault of about $160 million. Gaevoy said CeFi and OTC operations were not affected and the firm remained solvent with twice that amount in equity.

Because Wintermute does not hold customer assets, these were balance-sheet losses. For a project that lends it tokens, the lesson is that the loan is unsecured exposure to Wintermute's own operational security.