Why Wintermute is pushing $1 Billion into traditional markets
Yahoo Finance Video
Fri, August 14, 2026 at 12:30 AM GMT+5:30
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Why is crypto market maker Wintermute making a major push into traditional markets with plans to deploy $1 billion? Scott Melker breaks down what’s behind the move and why Wintermute is expanding beyond crypto
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00:00Speaker A
Wintermute plans $1 billion AI push into traditional markets. Okay, so Wintermute is the arguably the largest market maker in the crypto industry. And I think it makes a hell of a lot of sense that they would want to move from crypto into every other industry and market on the planet because that is clearly where the money is. But the funny part about this headline is, you know, Wintermute saw crypto volumes
00:29Speaker A
falling, right? We’ve seen Robin Hood earnings way down. Bitcoin miners are pivoting to AI. There’s the greater trend. So they saw crypto volumes falling and and they asked the question that every company has to ask asked itself in 2026
00:41Speaker A
Can we just call this AI? Call it AI. Remember long I told you about Long Island Ice Tea that rebranded to Long Island blockchain Ice Tea and it went up hundreds of percent. Now you just put AI in your name
00:54Speaker A
and you’re good. But listen, this is a natural and expected pivot. They want to they want their traditional market business to generate more than half of revenue by the end of 2027, with an an ambitious target because right now it’s at about 10%. And so they’re spending a billion dollars. I’m old enough to remember when that was a lot of money, uh, to build high frequency trading systems and to double down on AI to make sure that they do this. This, listen
01:18Speaker A
as I said, you know, we saw Robin Hood’s crypto earnings down massively, but they replaced that with prediction markets and did well. Coinbase suffering because their volumes are down massively. Wintermute is beholden to the same trend, which is the depths of a bare market, apathy, very little trading volume, very little to market make. They want to actually make money. So they’re going to go to greener pastures where they can do so. But just remember, I mean we have, you know, our our market
01:47Speaker A
makers are moving into other markets, our Bitcoin miners are becoming AI data centers, and our crypto exchanges are becoming everything apps that are focused more heavily on prediction markets than crypto volumes. That should show you everything you need to know about where we’re at in the cycle right now
