Wintermute plans to invest $1 billion in HFT and AI data centers as crypto trading volumes fall. CEO Gaevoy targets 50% of revenue from traditional markets by 2027.
Wintermute is spending its way out of a crypto slowdown. The London market maker plans to deploy roughly $1 billion over five years on high-frequency trading systems and AI data center infrastructure, pushing into equities, commodities, and currencies as its core crypto business shrinks.
Chief Executive Evgeny Gaevoy told Bloomberg the firm will fund the buildout from accumulated profits. Traditional markets now contribute about 10% of revenue. Gaevoy wants that share above 50% by the end of 2027.
The numbers explain the urgency. Wintermute's average daily trading volume has fallen to roughly $10 billion in 2026 from $15 billion in 2025. Bitcoin prices sit at about half their October peak above $126,000. The crypto bull market that generated $582 million in profit for Wintermute in 2021, as Forbes reported, is a fading memory.
Institutional investors made up 72% of spot market volume on Wintermute's over-the-counter platform in the first half of 2026. The company was profitable through 2025 and expects to stay there this year, Gaevoy said.
Wintermute is stepping into a ring dominated by Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and XTX Markets. XTX handles more than $250 billion in daily volume and recently disclosed plans to invest about $1.15 billion in five Finnish data centers. Jane Street has also started building its own data center facilities.
Success in these markets is not just about shaving microseconds off execution, Gaevoy said. The infrastructure will train quantitative trading models and expand compute power, storage, and network bandwidth. The firm started trading exchange-traded funds and perpetual futures tied to physical assets last year. It launched 24-hour West Texas Intermediate crude oil exposure in March and set up a prediction markets trading desk in early 2026.
Wintermute's U.S. subsidiary won a broker-dealer license in recent days. That lets the company trade equities and stock options and act as an authorized participant in ETF operations. The company plans to expand its New York office beyond the current 17-person team and increase global headcount by roughly 40% over the next year.
Wintermute's move mirrors a broader shift. Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken have diversified into tokenized equities and other instruments tied to conventional markets. Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin miner, signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for 191 megawatts of data center capacity at its Rockdale facility in a deal worth about $9.1 billion. The transaction shows how crypto firms are forging deeper ties with technology and financial services.
Wintermute is making a bet that its crypto-era trading technology can compete in markets where the incumbents have decades of experience. The $1 billion price tag says the company believes the answer is yes.
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