Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Pantera Capital, investment firms focused on blockchain and cryptocurrency, today announced an investment in Wintermute, a crypto-native market maker focused on creating efficient, liquid, transparent markets.
Other investors joining the round include Sino Global Capital, Kenetic Capital, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Hack VC, DeFi Alliance, and Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments.
Founded in 2017, Wintermute has deployed hundreds of successful proprietary trading algorithms across DeFi, CeFi, and OTC markets. The company provides liquidity for hundreds of traded pairs across dozens of exchange partners and offers market-making services to early-stage projects and exchanges.
“Wintermute has grown almost 25x since Lightspeed led the company’s Series A round just six months ago. That rarely happens! We are excited to continue supporting Wintermute and their ambitious expansion plans going forward.”
– Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed
The company’s 2021 plans include the launch of an RFQ platform for institutional counterparties to offer OTC trades at scale and aggressive scaling of their derivatives business. Wintermute is also expanding its presence to Asia with a new regional office in Singapore covering OTC and derivatives.
In December 2020, Wintermute handled $30 billion in monthly trading volume. Wintermute holds the number one spot on the Bitfinex leaderboard for volumes. Pantera Capital says the company has experienced 60% monthly revenue growth through 2020.
Wintermute supports liquidity for a broad range of products, from dYdX perpetual swaps and crypto exchange-traded products to long-tail assets on decentralized exchanges.
“We envision a future where liquidity across hundreds of DEXs is consolidated and easily accessed through aggregators like 1inch or Matcha. Market makers like Wintermute can plug liquidity directly into these aggregators and eventually make DEX markets as efficient as their centralized counterparts. This combination — user-focused DEX aggregators on the front end and hyper-efficient, sophisticated algorithms on the back end — has the potential to accelerate the adoption of DeFi and even disintermediate centralized exchanges.”
– The Pantera Capital Team
This latest round of funding comes on the heels of the Series A round the company closed in June 2020, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the institutional seed funding round led by Blockchain.com Ventures in January 2020.
