USDWintermute Registers U.S. Broker-Dealer, Targets Wall Street Market Making
Regulated expansion spans securities, ETFs, commodities and tokenized equities
TL;DR
- Wintermute USA is now registered with the SEC and is a FINRA member.
- The firm can trade securities, provide liquidity and support exchange-traded products.
- Evgeny Gaevoy wants Wintermute to challenge major market makers over several years.
Trade smarter on Jupiter, Solana’s leading DEX built for fast execution and deep liquidity.
Swap tokens at competitive rates, route across multiple liquidity sources automatically, and access perpetuals, DCA, and advanced trading tools — all in one place!
Wintermute announced on Aug. 6, 2026, that its New York-based subsidiary, Wintermute USA, had registered as a broker-dealer with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and become a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, opening a regulated path into U.S. stocks, options, exchange-traded products and other traditional markets.
The registration allows Wintermute USA to provide liquidity to U.S. securities exchanges and over-the-counter counterparties. It can also trade stocks and options through its proprietary account, meaning it may transact using the firm’s own capital, and self-clear eligible digital-asset securities transactions.
Wintermute USA can act as an Authorized Participant for exchange-traded products, “including those tied to digital assets,” Wintermute said. Authorized Participants create and redeem large blocks of ETF shares by exchanging cash or underlying securities with a fund, helping keep the product’s trading price aligned with the value of its holdings.
A broker-dealer may execute securities transactions for clients as a broker and trade securities for its own account as a dealer. Wintermute’s registration also makes the subsidiary eligible to seek market-maker roles on U.S. stock exchanges, although individual products and exchange appointments require additional approvals.
Wintermute said the registration marked its entry into U.S. regulated markets and strengthened its coverage of institutional counterparties in the region. The firm has already signed exchange-traded fund issuers as clients, positioning the subsidiary to compete for liquidity, creation and redemption work currently concentrated among established securities firms.
“Our long-term conviction has always been that digital asset markets will evolve in more than one direction,” Wintermute founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said. “Digital assets and traditional finance will continue to develop in parallel, intersect in new ways, and ultimately integrate more deeply.”
Wintermute plans a staged expansion
Gaevoy set a three-to-five-year goal for Wintermute to compete with Jump Trading, Jane Street and Citadel Securities. The planned expansion begins with commodities and digital-asset ETFs, markets that most closely resemble the products and exposures Wintermute already trades.
Tokenized equities would follow if regulators approve the relevant activities. Wintermute’s longer-term objective is to obtain designated market maker status on a major U.S. exchange, a role that gives a firm responsibility for maintaining orderly trading in assigned listed securities. Each stage requires a separate approval and does not follow automatically from the broker-dealer registration.
The size and concentration of the designated market maker business illustrate the competitive barriers Wintermute faces.
Every stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange receives one designated market maker. That structure limits the number of available appointments and gives incumbent firms substantial relationships with exchanges, listed companies and issuers entering the public markets.
Crypto ETF infrastructure creates an opening
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust held $43.2 billion at the end of June. Twelve firms were authorized to create and redeem shares of the fund, but none was identified as a crypto-native company.
The fund’s Authorized Participants included Jane Street, Citadel Securities, Virtu Americas, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Wintermute is seeking to enter that operational layer after previously being unable to participate directly in the creation and redemption infrastructure of major U.S. crypto exchange-traded products without broker-dealer registration.
Wintermute quotes prices across more than 60 venues and provides liquidity across centralized and decentralized exchanges globally. The London-based company said its wider operation facilitates over $10 billion in average daily trading volume.
Registration makes Wintermute eligible to compete for regulated securities and exchange-traded product work, but it does not automatically provide market share or an exchange appointment. Wintermute must still obtain the applicable approvals and win mandates from issuers, trading venues and institutional counterparties.
We’ve launched the all-new COIN360 Perp DEX, built for traders who move fast!
Trade 130+ assets with up to 100× leverage, enjoy instant order placement and low-slippage swaps, and earn USDC passive yield while climbing the leaderboard. Your trades deserve more than speed — they deserve mastery.
Institutional trading supports the strategy
Wintermute’s U.S. expansion builds on a growing concentration of institutional activity within its existing business.
“At three quarters of volume, institutional flow defines market structure,” Wintermute said in its H1 2026 OTC flow report.
Those counterparties already trade equities, commodities and ETFs through other providers. Wintermute’s strategy would allow the company to offer regulated traditional-asset services alongside its existing digital-asset execution and liquidity operations.
Wintermute began establishing its U.S. presence before completing the registration. The firm opened its New York headquarters in May 2025 and hired Ron Hammond, previously of the Blockchain Association, to lead policy work.
FINRA has 180 days to act after a membership application is complete. The regulator supervised 3,184 broker-dealers at the end of 2025, compared with 3,394 in 2021, a reduction of 210 firms, or approximately 6.2%.
Tokenized equities form the longer-term target
Wintermute linked its move into traditional assets to the growth of tokenization. The SEC has supported certain blockchain experiments while maintaining that placing a security onchain does not remove the asset or related activity from existing securities laws.
The agency has said various onchain securities activities require appropriate licensing. Wintermute’s registration provides a regulated base from which the firm can pursue those activities, subject to product-specific and exchange approvals.
Wintermute had already expanded beyond conventional spot crypto trading. Earlier in 2026, the firm said it would begin market-making for tokenized gold and provide two-sided liquidity for prediction markets.
Regulated infrastructure for tokenized shares was also developing. The SEC cleared a Nasdaq rule for tokenized share trading in March 2026, while New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange backed a tokenized-equities venture with OKX in June 2026.
Wintermute presented its preferred regulatory approach before becoming a registered broker-dealer. A September 2025 submission to the SEC’s Crypto Task Force argued that broker-dealers should be permitted to trade tokenized securities for their own accounts and hold those assets through wallet software.
Two issues were explicitly identified as unresolved: which securities Wintermute would quote first and whether an exchange would grant it market-maker status. The broker-dealer registration permits Wintermute to pursue those opportunities but does not itself secure either outcome.
This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.
