Lightspeed Venture Invests $2.8M in Crypto Market Maker Wintermute

Wintermute, an algorithmic liquidity provider, has received a $2.8 million investment from the prominent early-stage firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.

• The London-based firm distributes liquidity with techniques similar to those used in high-frequency trading and traditional market making.
• Founded in 2017, Wintermute provides liquidity on more than 500 spot trading pairs, on dYdX perpetual swaps and a handful of crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) from 21Shares (formerly Amun).
• The market maker will use the funding to expand further into crypto derivatives, as well as into the over-the-counter and decentralized finance spaces.
• The Series A comes months after Wintermute raised an undisclosed seven-figure sum in a seed round led by Blockchain.com's venture arm in February.
• Lightspeed was the first outside investor into Snap, the company behind the popular video messaging app Snapchat, in 2012; it also participatedhttps://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2013/04/11/1146545/0/en/OpenCoin-Developer-of-Ripple-Protocol-Closes-Funding-From-Andreessen-Horowitz-FF-Angel-IV-Lightspeed-Venture-Partners-and-Angel-Investors.html] in an angel round for Ripple, when it was still known as OpenCoin, in April 2013.
• Partner Jeremy Liew said market makers were fast becoming essential infrastructure providers as the growth of new crypto market subsets and diverging regulatory regimes had seen the number of standalone exchanges explode.
• In 2014, Lightspeed led Blockchain.com's $30.5 million Series A; the California-based investment firm raised a total of $4.1 billion across three funds in April this year.