Crypto market maker Wintermute plans to invest about $1 billion in high-frequency trading and artificial intelligence target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>Bloomberg report citing founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy. Wintermute expects to fund the spending with retained earnings.
The push follows a drop in crypto activity. Wintermute’s average daily trading volume fell to about $10 billion this year from $15 billion in 2025 as bitcoin declined to roughly half its October peak above $126,000.
Institutions accounted for a record 72% of spot trading volume on its over-the-counter desk in the first half of 2026.
Gaevoy said the privately held company was profitable in 2025 and expects to remain profitable this year, without providing figures. Wintermute recorded $582 million in profit during the 2021 crypto bull market, according to Forbes.
The investment would help Wintermute compete with firms including Jane Street, Citadel Securities and XTX Markets. XTX, which trades more than $250 billion a day, announced plans last year to spend €1 billion, or about $1.15 billion, on five data centers in Finland.
Jane Street is also preparing to build and finance its own data center.
Wintermute will use the infrastructure to train quantitative models on large volumes of market data and increase its computing, storage and networking capacity. Gaevoy said competing in traditional markets requires more than reducing execution times by microseconds.
The firm began trading exchange-traded funds and perpetual futures tied to real-world assets in 2025 and added 24-hour exposure to West Texas Intermediate crude in March. It also opened a prediction-markets desk in early 2026.
Wintermute’s U.S. affiliate secured broker-dealer status last week, allowing it to trade stocks and stock options and act as an authorized participant for exchange-traded funds.
CoinDesk has reached out to Wintermute for comment.
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