London-based Wintermute, an algorithmic liquidity supplier for digital belongings, closed a $20 million Sequence B led by Lightspeed Enterprise Companions with participation from Pantera Capital.
Different traders becoming a member of the spherical embrace Sino World Capital, Kenetic Capital, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Hack VC, DeFi Alliance and Avon Ventures, a enterprise capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the guardian firm of Constancy Investments.
Introduced Wednesday, Wintermute plans to make use of the funding to open its first worldwide workplace in Singapore within the first quarter of this yr, spearheading a normal push into Asia, the corporate stated.
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The corporate additionally plans to launch a derivatives enterprise and supply RFQ or “request-for-quote” companies for counterparties, sometimes used for buying and selling illiquid markets.
RFQ is principally an automatic model of Wintermute’s over-the-counter buying and selling enterprise and one thing the agency was “actually pulled into” by its counterparties, in accordance with Wintermute COO Marina Gurevich.
“We have been doing loads of OTC transactions with numerous institutional counterparties and plenty of of them have been asking us to supply RFQ so they may commerce extra with us,” Gurevich stated through e mail. “With institutional demand for OTC rising in December, we’ve seen demand speed up, so we have been doing pilots and are launching Beta RFQ now.”
Based in 2017, Wintermute supplies liquidity on greater than 500 spot buying and selling pairs, on dYdX perpetual swaps and a handful of crypto exchange-traded merchandise (ETPs) from 21Shares. In addition to centralized exchanges and OTC, Wintermute is targeted on the burgeoning world of decentralized finance (DeFi).
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Gurevich stated Wintermute will look to supply liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that the agency believes in, even when their volumes are low.
“We work with many DeFi initiatives supporting liquidity of their tokens on CeFi exchanges. We don’t cost charges and we companion with the initiatives we consider can have an effect long-term,” Gurevich stated. “We assist initiatives begin AMMs [automated market makers] and help liquidity there. We work with DEX aggregators to supply liquidity instantly and that is what we consider will develop in future.”
Again in July 2020, Wintermute raised $2.8 million in funding from Lightspeed. Over the course of final yr, the corporate stated it has seen explosive buying and selling volumes, rising at a 60% month-to-month charge and reaching $30 billion month-to-month buying and selling quantity by December.
As a part of at present’s announcement, Jeremy Liew, companion at Lightspeed, will be part of Wintermute’s board of administrators.
“Wintermute has grown virtually 25x since we led the Sequence A spherical simply six months in the past,” Liew stated in a press assertion. “That hardly ever occurs.”
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