London-based crypto market maker Wintermute registered as a broker-dealer with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the firm said in a statement on 6 Aug, becoming the latest crypto-native firm to plant a flag in regulated US finance.
Crypto Market Maker Wintermute Becomes a Wall Street Broker-Dealer
7 August 2026 - 11:53 UTC
By Oihyun Kim
The registration allows its New York-based subsidiary, Wintermute USA LLC, to trade equities and equity options and act as an Authorized Participant (AP) for exchange-traded products (ETPs), including digital-asset exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It can also self-clear digital-asset securities transactions for its proprietary account.
CEO Evgeny Gaevoy told the Wall Street Journal that the firm will initially focus on commodities and digital-asset ETFs, and expand into tokenized equities if US regulators permit them.
"Digital assets and traditional finance will continue to develop in parallel, intersect in new ways and ultimately integrate more deeply," Gaevoy said in the statement. "As the landscape evolves, the firms that succeed will be those that have technical and operational know-how to operate in both."
Registration, not acquisition
What sets Wintermute's move apart is the route. Peers pushing into US regulated markets have mostly bought their way in. Ripple paid $1.25bn last year for prime broker Hidden Road; rival market maker GSR acquired Equilibrium Capital Services; and Crypto.com bought SEC-registered Watchdog Capital in 2024.
Wintermute instead pursued direct registration, a slower path that avoids acquisition premiums and integration risk but demands building compliance, clearing and market-making infrastructure from the ground up.
Wintermute was co-founded in 2017 by Gaevoy, who previously built and ran Optiver's European ETF business, and Yoann Turpin, a former Optiver high-frequency trader, and has grown into one of the top crypto market makers by volume. The group processes $3.5tn in annual trading and averages $10bn in daily trades across more than 60 centralized and decentralized venues, from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to Uniswap.
Building through the slump
The timing is notable. The move comes almost a year into a crypto price slump and after the Clarity Act, the crypto industry's central US market-structure bill, stalled in the Senate.
Yet the institutional infrastructure keeps being built out. Wintermute has already signed ETF issuers as clients and told the Wall Street Journal it aims to compete with top US market-making firms such as Jump Trading, Jane Street and Citadel Securities within three to five years. That target is an implicit bet that its TradFi flow will eventually rival its crypto-native business.
