By deftly navigating crypto’s frontier markets and winning big on the collapse of Terra’s stable coin, Wintermute has grown into one of the world’s leading crypto trading firms. Now it must navigate a market littered with carcasses and landmines.
Evgeny Gaevoy was contemplating what to do if terraUSD (UST), a cryptocurrency stable coin pegged to the value of one U.S. dollar, imploded. UST had about $15 billion in circulating coins, and its parent company was backed by highly regarded investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners. But as early as 2021, a small set of people had been tweeting about its potential demise, saying that algorithm-based stable coins not backed by government-issued currencies were doomed to fail.
This past February, 38-year-old Gaevoy said to himself, “If this happens, we want to be in the middle of it.” His company, London-based Wintermute, is a trading firm that does rapid buying and selling of digital assets, pocketing tiny fractions of a dollar in profits from millions of trades a day. The more the market moves up or down, the more money they make.
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