Wintermute

History

2022

The company raised $2.8 million

On December 20, 2022, Forbes magazine published material about the success story of the cryptocurrency company Wintermute with Russian roots, founded by Yevgeny Gaev. According to the publication, the startup for a record volume of operations with digital assets, which reached $1.5 trillion.

Wintermute began operations in 2017. The company is engaged in the rapid purchase and sale of crypto assets, leaving itself a insignificant share of profits. Wintermute raised $2.8 million in a Series A funding round, and the leading investor was Lightspeed Venture Partners, Forbes writes.

Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy and his wife Marina Gurevich

In the future, Gaevoy reportedly reflected on what can be done in the event of the collapse of stablecoin terraUSD (UST), which is pegged in value to the US dollar. The token's capitalization reached approximately $15 billion, and its parent company received funding from well-known investors, including the aforementioned Lightspeed. In 2021, Twitter (banned in Russia) reported the possible death of UST. In February 2022, Gaevoy and Marina Gurevich, his wife and chief operating officer of Wintermute, began to build an action plan. Wintermute employees spent a month integrating their trading systems with blockchainTerra technology . 4,000 lines of code were written to implement the new trading algorithms.

On May 7, 2022, when the UST price fell to $0.98, Gaevoy asked his team to organize night shifts. Two days later, UST's staggering downfall began and Wintermute went into action. The company acquired UST at a price of $0.80 and resold it for $1 in the form of a token for the related cryptocurrency Luna. As a result, Wintermute traded more than $250 million, bringing the rate to $0.10 per token. Profits were in the tens of millions of dollars. Gaeva is not the main reason for the death of Terra, but made a certain contribution to this process, becoming a major buyer of UST, while others desperately tried to sell it.^[1]

Loss of $160 million due to cyber attack

The British crypto market Wintermute lost assets worth approximately $160 million as a result of a cyber attack. This became known on September 21, 2022.

As Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO of Wintermute, said on Twitter, DeFi operations (decentralized financial services) of the crypto exchange were hacked, but the rest of the segments were not affected. According to Gayevoy, the service remains solvent, and the remaining assets double the stolen amount.

Gaevoy noted that in the coming days Wintermute will function intermittently, but then it is planned to restore its functionality completely.

Wintermute provides liquidity for 50 exchanges trade and crypto platforms, including,, Binance, and Coinbase FTX Kraken decentralized Dydx and Uniswap platforms. In addition, the service acts as an active investor: its support is used by such as startups Nomad HashFlow and OndoFinance.

Gaeva did not give any details about how the hackers managed to hack the system, and when exactly the incident happened. He also did not say anything about whether law enforcement agencies were involved in the investigation of the attack^[2].

Notes