That’s according to a report Wednesday (Aug. 12) by Bloomberg News, which characterizes the move as the London-based trading firm’s efforts to diversify into traditional markets as the price of cryptocurrency slumps.
Founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said in an interview Bloomberg Wintermute wants to rebrand itself as a dealer in equities, commodities and foreign exchange, following in the steps of players like Jane Street or Citadel Securities.
“We are now going up against firms that have spent decades optimizing their technology and infrastructure for these markets, so obviously the level of investment required is significant,” he said.
Competing in this space means “going beyond shaving microseconds off execution,” Gaevoy said. “Training and continuously retraining much more sophisticated quantitative models on enormous amounts of market data, as well as having access to compute, storage, and networking capacity, is essential.”
Wintermute recorded profits of $582 million when the crypto market was flourishing in 2021, Bloomberg added, citing reporting from Forbes, though the company has not published financial figures since then. Gaevoy said Wintermute was profitable last year and is on pace to do the same thing for 2026, but declined to offer additional details.
As the report notes, the crypto sector is suffering through an extended downturn that has essentially halved the price of bitcoin following a $126,000-plus peak last October
Wintermute’s average daily trading volume has dropped from about $15 billion in 2025 to $10 billion this year, Gaevoy told Bloomberg.
His comments follow a weekend report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) about the exodus of cryptocurrency investors into AI stocks amid the digital asset space’s continuing bear market.
Ryan Ho, founder of social-trading app Legend, told the WSJ he began moving away from crypto based on his view that the market no longer operated like a healthy risk asset in the wake of last year’s crash.
He said the potential for AI’s growth was more attractive to retail investors because it was connected to real-world uses, like ChatGPT or AI-powered coding. Another factor driving the shift is the fact that trading platforms like Hyperliquid began turning to AI derivatives.
“That’s why most crypto traders started trading AI equities over the past few months. It’s just because it just became available to do,” Ho said.
