Wintermute is planning to invest approximately $1 billion over the next five years in high-frequency trading and artificial-intelligence infrastructure, accelerating an expansion that could transform one of crypto’s largest market makers into a broader multi-asset trading firm. The investment will include computing and data-center infrastructure for AI alongside the low-latency technology required to compete in traditional high-frequency markets, CEO and co-founder Evgeny Gaevoy told Bloomberg. Wintermute ultimately wants more than half of its business to come from outside crypto, according to reports on the plan.
That would represent a significant shift for a firm built around cryptocurrency market making. Wintermute says it already handles more than $3.5 trillion in annual trading volume and operates across more than 70 exchanges, while its proprietary trading systems combine low-latency infrastructure with quantitative and machine-learning strategies.
Wintermute Wants to Take Crypto-Speed Trading to Wall Street
Wintermute’s advantage in digital assets has been built around conditions increasingly appearing in traditional finance: continuous markets, fragmented liquidity and enormous quantities of real-time data. The company now wants to apply that infrastructure beyond cryptocurrencies. Traditional high-frequency trading is an expensive business. Firms compete partly through execution speed, requiring strategically located servers, specialized networking, substantial computing resources and sophisticated algorithms capable of processing market information in fractions of a second.
AI adds another layer of infrastructure demand as trading firms use increasingly computationally intensive models to extract signals from enormous datasets. Wintermute already says its quantitative team analyzes both crypto and traditional financial-market data, while its infrastructure uses a global network of strategically located servers and proprietary technology built in-house. The planned $1 billion investment effectively scales that architecture for a much larger market. The expansion also follows Wintermute’s establishment of a New York headquarters. The company opened its U.S. base in 2025 and has been expanding its regulatory and institutional footprint in the world’s largest financial market.
Crypto Market Makers Are Becoming Multi-Asset Trading Firms
Wintermute’s push reflects a broader convergence between crypto and traditional finance. The company no longer limits itself to spot cryptocurrency and perpetual futures. In May, it entered prediction markets as a liquidity provider, extending its trading infrastructure into event contracts after the sector surpassed $60 billion in trading volume during 2026. Traditional assets are the much larger opportunity. Equities, ETFs, foreign exchange and commodities offer vastly deeper pools of institutional capital than crypto alone. At the same time, tokenization is beginning to blur the distinction between conventional securities and digital assets.
NYSE is developing blockchain infrastructure for tokenized securities, Coinbase is building a regulated tokenization hub in Abu Dhabi, and major financial institutions are experimenting with putting stocks, bonds and funds onchain. That creates an unusual opportunity for firms such as Wintermute. Infrastructure originally designed for 24/7 crypto markets could become increasingly relevant as traditional markets adopt continuous trading, blockchain settlement and tokenized assets. The competitive challenge is formidable. Traditional electronic market making is dominated by firms such as Citadel Securities, Jane Street, Virtu Financial and other highly sophisticated quantitative trading businesses with decades of infrastructure investment.
Wintermute is effectively proposing to enter that competition with technology developed in crypto. Its existing operation provides scale: the company describes itself as active across CeFi, DeFi and traditional financial markets, trading exclusively with proprietary capital and using strategies ranging from latency-sensitive arbitrage to longer-horizon quantitative models. Wintermute is not abandoning crypto. Instead, it is betting that the technology required to dominate fast, fragmented digital-asset markets can be exported to Wall Street. If more than half of its business eventually comes from traditional assets, Wintermute will have completed a transition few crypto-native companies have attempted: from market maker for digital tokens to direct competitor with some of the world’s largest electronic trading firms.
