Wintermute expands into US equity options with SEC, FINRA approvals

Wintermute on Thursday announced that its US affiliate has registered as a broker-dealer with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, enabling the firm to trade equity options.

The registration makes Wintermute USA an Authorised Participant for exchange-traded products, including those tied to digital assets, solely for its own proprietary account and self-clears digital asset securities transactions.

The trading platform said that the approval marks a key milestone in its institutional expansion across regulated US markets, strategically positioning the firm for the emerging tokenised securities landscape.

"Our long-term conviction has always been that digital asset markets will evolve in more than one direction," said Evgeny Gaevoy (pictured), founder and chief executive of Wintermute, in a release.

"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.”

Wintermute in May confirmed that it was providing liquidity on prediction markets, extending the institutional-grade trading infrastructure it operates across 70+ exchanges into one of the fastest-growing segments in financial markets.

The crypto liquidity provider said it facilitates over $10 billion (£7.4bn) in average daily trading volume and provides liquidity across centralised and decentralised exchanges globally.

The launch of Wintermute USA reflects broader changes in market structure as institutional trading activity increasingly spans asset classes, venues, and settlement rails, the UK firm said.

Meanwhile, US-based online brokerage Tastytrade last week expanded its suite of trading tools to offer short-duration, Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated event contracts directly within its existing platform.

Another US-based electronic trading platform Interactive Brokers last week announced that its clients can now connect their accounts to any artificial intelligence tool that supports the Model Context Protocol, including Claude Code, Cursor, Perplexity and Windsurf.