Wintermute

TLDR

Wintermute is an algorithmic trading firm founded in London in 2017 that has grown into one of the largest market makers in digital assets. The firm provides programmatic liquidity across more than 50 centralized and decentralized exchanges, executes more than $5 billion in daily trading volume, and trades over 1,000 digital assets. On Solana specifically, Wintermute operates Tessera V, a proprietary automated market maker (AMM) that handles billions of dollars in monthly trades through Jupiter's aggregator. Beyond market making, Wintermute runs an OTC desk for institutional clients, a ventures arm that has backed more than 100 Web3 projects, and a Solana-focused accelerator program for early-stage builders.

Core Mechanism

Wintermute's competitive edge is its purely algorithmic approach to market making. Rather than relying on human traders or passive liquidity pools, the firm deploys high-frequency algorithms that continuously quote bid and ask prices across exchanges and trading venues simultaneously. These algorithms process real-time market data in microseconds, adjust quotes based on risk parameters and inventory positions, and reference off-chain price feeds to keep on-chain quotes accurate.

The firm earns revenue primarily through the bid-ask spread on high-volume pairs like Bitcoin and Ethereum. For smaller or less liquid tokens, Wintermute operates under contractual agreements with exchanges and projects, receiving fee rebates in exchange for maintaining tight spreads and consistent presence in order books. This dual revenue model — spread capture plus contract-based agreements — lets the firm profitably provide liquidity across the full risk spectrum of digital assets, from major tokens to early-stage project launches.

Services

Market Making. Wintermute quotes on over 50 CEXs and DEXs simultaneously, including Binance, Coinbase, and a wide range of decentralized platforms. Project teams launching a token can engage Wintermute to ensure deep order books from day one, avoiding the thin markets and price instability that hurt new token launches.

OTC Trading via NODE. Wintermute's NODE platform gives institutional clients direct access to its principal desk for over 250 digital assets with zero trading fees. Products available on the OTC desk include spot, options, forwards, CFDs, and custom-structured products. In 2024, Wintermute's OTC volumes grew 313%, outpacing overall crypto exchange volume growth of 142%. A single-day record of $2.24 billion in OTC volume was set in November 2024, surpassing the previous weekly record. Traditional finance firms accounted for 240% more OTC activity year-over-year in 2024, underscoring the platform's role in bridging institutional capital into crypto.

DeFi and Proprietary AMMs. Wintermute actively manages on-chain liquidity across decentralized exchanges. On Solana, the firm runs Tessera V, a dark proprietary AMM that was integrated into Jupiter's routing engine in June 2025. Unlike public DEXs such as Raydium or Orca, dark AMMs like Tessera V do not accept external liquidity providers or display a user-facing interface. All liquidity comes from Wintermute's own balance sheet. Tessera V uses oracle-based pricing to keep quotes accurate against real-time off-chain data, enabling it to offer tighter spreads than passive pools. By August 2025, Tessera V had captured approximately 6% of proprietary AMM volume on Solana and handled $6.6 billion in trades over one month. Independent analysis placed Tessera V in the top tier for spread tightness, clustering in the 1.3-3 basis-point range across trade sizes from $100 to $1 million.

Ventures. Wintermute Ventures is the firm's early-stage investment arm, which has backed over 100 projects since 2020 using exclusively proprietary capital. The portfolio spans DeFi protocols, infrastructure, security, stablecoins, and tokenization. Notable investments include Polygon, Optimism, zkSync, dYdX, 1inch, Aave, Lido, and Zerion. Wintermute Ventures also holds a significant position in Solana-native memecoins, having built a portfolio valued at approximately $33 million as of late 2024, with holdings in MOODENG, GOAT, MEW, and PONKE.

Construct Accelerator. In June 2026, Wintermute merged its Construct mentorship program with Fabric Ventures' Rsidency to launch a 12-week accelerator specifically targeting Solana builders. Eight teams per cohort each receive $300,000, access to Wintermute's operator network, and mentorship from ecosystem partners. The program accepts projects in crypto, AI, robotics, and fintech built on Solana's high-throughput architecture. The combined program is highly selective — historical Rsidency cohorts drew over 800 applicants for roughly eight spots.

Tokens and Assets

Wintermute does not issue a native token. Its market-making operations touch hundreds of tokens and pairs across CEXs and DEXs. The firm's ventures portfolio provides token exposure to many of its backed projects, typically obtained at early-stage valuations. On Solana, Wintermute holds direct spot exposure to Solana-native memecoins and provides liquidity for SOL and USDC pairs through Tessera V.

Security

In September 2022, Wintermute's DeFi operations were exploited for approximately $160 million. The root cause was a compromised private key linked to a vanity address generated by a tool called Profanity. One week before the exploit, 1inch Network had publicly warned that Profanity-generated addresses were vulnerable because the tool seeded its randomness generator with only a 32-bit number, making brute-force recovery of private keys computationally feasible. Attackers stole roughly $120 million in stablecoins and $40 million in Bitcoin, Ether, and other cryptocurrencies. CEO Evgeny Gaevoy confirmed the hack publicly within hours, stated the firm remained solvent, and confirmed that centralized finance and OTC operations were unaffected. The exploit became one of the five largest DeFi hacks of 2022, but it did not disrupt Wintermute's broader trading business, which continued operating without interruption.

Team

Wintermute was founded in 2017 by Evgeny Gaevoy, who serves as CEO. Before founding Wintermute, Gaevoy ran the European ETF business at Optiver, one of the world's leading high-frequency trading firms, where he built one of the largest ETF market-making operations in the EU. Co-founder and trader Yoann brings over a decade of high-frequency trading experience, also from Optiver. Marina, a third key figure, leads growth strategy, having previously advised private equity and venture-backed B2B companies and held senior roles at Procter & Gamble, Philips, and Nikon. The firm employs roughly 100 people across offices in London, New York, and Singapore. In 2024, Wintermute reportedly paid an average of approximately $1.2 million per employee, reflecting the premium placed on quantitative and engineering talent.

Solana Fit

Solana's architecture aligns closely with Wintermute's algorithmic approach. The chain's sub-second block times, high throughput, and low transaction costs enable the rapid quote updates and inventory management that proprietary market making requires. On slower or more expensive chains, updating quotes frequently enough to avoid adverse selection is prohibitively costly. Solana removes that constraint, allowing Tessera V to behave more like a high-frequency order book than a passive AMM.

Wintermute's commitment to Solana extends beyond Tessera V. The Construct accelerator explicitly targets Solana founders, and the firm's memecoin holdings are almost entirely Solana-native assets. The firm's dual role as both liquidity provider and capital backer creates compounding incentives to grow the Solana ecosystem: deeper project activity means more tokens to market-make, more institutional clients seeking OTC exposure, and more founders seeking Construct cohort entry. By embedding itself as a market infrastructure provider at Solana's liquidity layer, Wintermute occupies a position that few firms can replicate — one built on balance-sheet depth, algorithmic sophistication, and nine years of institutional market-making experience.

Wintermute's total trading history exceeds $4.9 trillion in notional volume since inception. In 2021 alone, the firm traded more than $1.5 trillion and generated over $1 billion in revenue. CEO Gaevoy's participation in the Goldman Sachs Digital Asset conference in mid-2026 reflects Wintermute's continued positioning at the intersection of traditional finance and digital asset infrastructure.