Wintermute’s CEO, Evgeny Gaevoy, just dropped some big news: the firm is planning to sink about $1 billion over the next five years into AI data centers and high-frequency trading infrastructure. It’s a massive play to go toe-to-toe with Wall Street heavyweights like Citadel Securities and Jane Street.
The goal is to flip the script on revenue, pushing non-crypto income from a measly 10 percent to over 50 percent by late 2027. The move comes as crypto trading volumes have slumped, with Bitcoin roughly half its all-time high (ATH).
The strategy: From crypto market maker to multi-asset powerhouse
Why the sudden pivot? Simple: the crypto market is drying up (at least for some time). Daily trading volumes have tanked from $15 billion last year to just $10 billion today, forcing Wintermute to look elsewhere for growth.
“We now have to compete with firms that have been optimizing their technology and infrastructure for decades, and the scale of investment required is correspondingly substantial,” commented Gaevoy. The company has already laid the groundwork for its traditional finance (TradFi) push.
Also, the firm plans to double its 17-person New York office headcount next year and increase global staff by 40 percent.
The AI infrastructure arms race
Wintermute’s investment is part of a broader AI infrastructure buildout across the quantitative trading industry. XTX Markets, which trades over $250 billion daily, announced a roughly €1 billion investment to build five data centers in Finland.
Jane Street is also building its own dedicated data centers. Gaevoy explained:* “It’s no longer just about reducing execution speed to microseconds. The key is continuously training sophisticated quantitative models on vast market data and securing the compute, storage, and network infrastructure to support that.”*
Wintermute plans to fund the entire $1 billion investment from its own retained earnings, without external capital raising. This shouldn’t be a stretch for them, considering they cleared a cool $582 million during the 2021 bull run and kept that winning streak alive through 2025.
The SEC registration: Wintermute’s regulatory bridge to Wall Street
That huge $1 billion AI bet Wintermute is making? It’s all thanks to a massive regulatory win they snagged just a few days ago. On August 6, 2026, Wintermute USA LLC registered as a broker-dealer with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and became a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
This authorizes Wintermute to trade U.S. stocks and equity options, provide liquidity to national securities exchanges, and act as an Authorized Participant for exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The registration removes the regulatory uncertainty that has kept many crypto-native firms from competing on Wall Street.
With the regulatory foundation in place, the $1 billion AI infrastructure investment becomes the operational engine to compete with Citadel Securities and Jane Street on their home turf.