Wintermute registers a US broker-dealer to trade stocks and ETPs

What happened

Wintermute said on 6 August that its affiliate Wintermute USA LLC 'has registered as a broker-dealer with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), marking a formal expansion into U.S. regulated markets'. The release describes the affiliate as 'a regulated proprietary trading firm, providing liquidity to national securities exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) counterparties', and says the registration lets it 'trade traditional equities and equity options, act as an Authorized Participant (AP) for exchange-traded products (ETPs), including those tied to digital assets, solely for its own proprietary account, and self-clear digital asset securities transactions for its own account'. FINRA's BrokerCheck register carries Wintermute USA LLC as an active broker-dealer with the SEC file number 8-71401 and one branch, at an address on Broadway in New York, and dates FINRA's approval 6 August 2026. 'Our long-term conviction has always been that digital asset markets will evolve in more than one direction', said Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute. 'Digital assets and traditional finance will continue to develop in parallel, intersect in new ways, and ultimately integrate more deeply. As the landscape evolves, the firms that succeed will be those that have technical and operational know-how to operate in both.' The group says it handles over $10bn of average daily trading volume and provides liquidity across more than 60 centralised and decentralised exchanges.

Why it matters

What the licence buys is narrower and more interesting than a headline about a crypto firm on Wall Street. Acting as an authorised participant is the arbitrage seat in an exchange-traded product: the participant creates and redeems the large share blocks that hold the fund's price against the value of what it owns, and for a product tied to digital assets that means a firm quoting the token and the wrapper can now stand on both sides of the same basis. Self-clearing digital asset securities transactions for its own account is the other half, and it is the part that only matters if tokenized securities become tradable at scale, because it removes the clearing broker from between the firm and a security that settles on a chain. The perimeter also bounds the business: proprietary only means no customer money, so none of the customer protection and segregation machinery applies, and the release says the firm 'focuses exclusively on proprietary trading and ETP services'. CoinDesk records the routes others took to the same place, all of them purchases rather than applications: Ripple bought the prime broker Hidden Road in 2025, GSR acquired Equilibrium Capital Services and Crypto.com bought Watchdog Capital in 2024.

What is not settled

The release names no venue, no counterparty, no product and no start date, and the reports fill the gap unevenly. CoinDesk says the registration makes Wintermute eligible for market-making roles on exchanges including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, and attributes to the Wall Street Journal a report that the firm has commitments from exchange-traded fund issuers; that report was not read here. The Block describes the announcement as covering equities and commodities trading, where the release names equities and equity options and no commodity. CoinDesk's headline calls the registration an SEC approval; the company describes a registration, and the approval that BrokerCheck dates to 6 August is FINRA's. The release says the registration positions the firm 'for the emerging tokenized securities landscape' without naming a tokenized security it can trade, and the SEC's own position remains that putting a security on a chain does not stop it being a security. The release also carries the standard caution that 'Registration with FINRA does not imply an endorsement of the firm by regulators.'