A couple of years ago Wintermute was a purely crypto story — a London firm supplying liquidity across dozens of exchanges and profiting from the spread. Now it has a US broker-dealer license, putting it on the same regulatory footing as Citadel Securities and Jane Street.
The company's New York arm, Wintermute USA, has registered with the SEC and become a FINRA member. The registration covers proprietary trading rather than retail brokerage: the firm can now trade stocks and options for its own account, provide liquidity to exchanges and OTC counterparties, and self-clear digital asset securities transactions.
One detail matters more than it sounds: Wintermute can now act as an authorized participant for exchange-traded funds, including crypto-linked ones. Authorized participants are the entities that create and redeem ETF shares by exchanging them for the underlying asset. The more of them a fund has, the tighter its spread and the less its price drifts from the actual value of the bitcoin or ether sitting inside it.
Wintermute handles over $10 billion in average daily trading volume across more than 60 centralized and decentralized venues, making it one of the largest market makers in crypto. It opened its New York headquarters only in 2025, so landing a broker-dealer license a year later reads less like a surprise and more like the obvious next step.
CEO Evgeny Gaevoy summed up the logic bluntly: digital assets and traditional finance will keep developing in parallel, intersect more often, and eventually merge more deeply. The firm hasn't named which ETF issuers it's already working with, but it's said to be eyeing market-making roles on the NYSE and Nasdaq.
Wintermute isn't breaking new ground here — Ripple, GSR and Crypto.com picked up similar US licenses before it. The SEC keeps stressing that securities law applies regardless of whether an asset trades in tokenized form or the old-fashioned way. One market maker's expanded license is less a headline event on its own than a symptom of how fast the line between crypto and Wall Street keeps thinning.
