LONDON — Wintermute's U.S. arm has registered as a broker-dealer, bringing the firm under direct oversight from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The move makes Wintermute eligible to seek designated market-maker status on exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
The London-based trading firm, founded in 2017 by Evgeny Gaevoy, is already registered with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. Wintermute specializes in high-frequency market making and runs its own trading algorithms across digital asset venues.
The firm plans to begin trading in crypto-related markets, focusing specifically on commodities and digital-asset exchange-traded funds. Wintermute USA has already secured several ETF issuers as clients.
Over the next three to five years, Wintermute aims to compete directly with established Wall Street market-making firms including Jump Trading, Jane Street and Citadel Securities.
The firm's long-term roadmap includes tokenized equities, contingent on receiving necessary permissions from U.S. regulators.
Wintermute recently entered prediction markets as a liquidity provider. Its arrival signals a shift beyond early-stage liquidity profiles — continuous bid and offer quoting tightens spreads, improves the reliability of market-implied probabilities and absorbs large directional trades.
Kalshi, a prediction market platform, raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation in May. The platform reported $178 billion in annualized trading volume and an 800 percent surge in institutional flow over six months.
Robinhood Markets has also been rolling out event contracts on its app, giving retail traders direct exposure to prediction market growth.
Wintermute has actively engaged the SEC on regulatory clarity for digital assets. The firm urged the SEC to affirm that broker-dealers may trade tokenized securities for their own account, self-clear those trades and custody proprietary positions using wallet software.
Wintermute also advocated for clarity that providing liquidity or trading tokenized securities on DeFi protocols does not automatically trigger broker-dealer registration requirements — whether the participants are U.S. or non-U.S. entities, absent customer-facing activity.
The open question is how much additional institutional flow the prediction market sector can absorb before liquidity fully catches up with the growing number of market participants.
