Wintermute, a London-based cryptocurrency markets liquidity provider or market maker has announced the closure of its Series A funding round through which it raised $2.8 million from Silicon Valley venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
This funding round only was the participation of Lightspeed according to an announcement release published on Tuesday. The funds raised will help Wintermute:
“accelerate its expansion into new liquidity products, specifically: derivatives, over-the-counter (OTC) market-making and DeFi, enabling [it] to further contribute to the liquid and efficient markets across the crypto ecosystem.”
As a market maker, Wintermute is instrumental to most upcoming cryptocurrency trading platforms as well as merchants launching cryptocurrency-based trading products.
This is because these platforms need liquidity on their platforms to survive the initial stages of launch. Additionally, the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies has led to the consequent increase in the number of trading platforms which makes the Wintermute services even more sought after and essential across the globe.
“The growing number of crypto exchanges is leading to an increased need for market making, and that is where Wintermute comes in. With its strategic, tech-first approach, [it] is making it easier for retail and institutional investors to buy and sell crypto,” said Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Wintermute employs a host of technologies including age-old traditional liquidity making technologies prevalent in the traditional markets such as high-frequency trading. It also doubles down on the use of algorithmic trading techniques to ensure efficiency in market making.
“Wintermute is a next-generation, crypto-native market maker, focused on building a decentralized financial system by creating efficient, liquid markets with transparent prices,” the company explains in the release.
Launched in 2017, Wintermute has expanded its services to support more than 500 spot trading crypto-asset pairs on various platforms and perpetual swaps on decentralized trading platform dYdX.
Additionally, it has recently been providing liquidity for novel crypto products such as crypto-based exchange-traded products from 21Shares (formerly referred to as Amun AG). It is now eying further expansion across growing sub-niches in the blockchain sector. DeFi has been blowing up recently with new companies forming fairly frequently to take advantage of the growing interest in the new market.
“We made a deliberate decision to be a technology company, not a financial services one, and it’s our tech-first approach that enables us to develop liquidity solutions that will drive the growth of the overall market in both the near and long-term,” said Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO, Wintermute.
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