#1574 Evgeny Gaevoy | Who’s Really Buying Bitcoin Right Now
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: #1574 Evgeny Gaevoy | Who’s Really Buying Bitcoin Right Now
This episode of the Pomp Podcast features an in-depth conversation with Evgeny Gaevoy, Founder and CEO of Wintermute, one of the dominant forces in crypto market making and liquidity provision. The discussion centers on the current drivers of Bitcoin price action, the evolving landscape of crypto trading, and Wintermute’s unique position bridging traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized markets.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is Cryptocurrency Market Structure and Liquidity Dynamics, specifically identifying the major buyers driving the recent Bitcoin price surge, the increasing sophistication of trading instruments (like options), and the strategic role of Over-The-Counter (OTC) desks in market operations.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Shift in Buyer Concentration: Recent Bitcoin and Ethereum trading volume is overwhelmingly driven by two main groups: traditional institutions (e.g., BlackRock, Fidelity) and large retail aggregators (e.g., Robinhood). Traditional OTC counterparties are reportedly reducing their exposure.
- Derivatives Adoption: There is a significant surge in interest in options trading for major assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, driven both by sophisticated traditional players accustomed to complex strategies and by educating crypto-native counterparties on advanced tools.
- OTC Desk Utility: OTC desks remain crucial for large players, particularly in altcoins, because they offer time variance in execution, allowing large trades to be executed without immediately signaling market intent or being front-run, which is difficult to hide on-chain or on public exchanges.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Institutional Dominance: The current all-time high in Bitcoin is being fueled by institutional capital flowing through regulated channels (ETFs), rather than solely by grassroots retail accumulation.
- “Bitcoin Beta” Chasing: Crypto-native firms are showing reduced interest in Bitcoin (down 5% in the report) as they seek assets that can outperform Bitcoin, pushing further out on the risk curve (e.g., Solana, meme coins, or specific DeFi tokens like Hyperliquid).
- Ethereum Reversal Play: Ethereum is seeing renewed interest as a potential outperformer, largely because it has significantly lagged Bitcoin relative to its previous all-time highs, making it an attractive reversal candidate for capital seeking upside.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Evgeny Gaevoy (Wintermute CEO): Founder of the major market-making firm, with a background in economics (Moscow High School of Economics) and 10 years in TradFi market making at Optiver before entering crypto in 2017.
- BlackRock & Fidelity: Cited as examples of the traditional financial institutions now driving significant Bitcoin demand via ETFs.
- Robinhood/Public.com/eToro: Mentioned as large fintech aggregators that are centralizing retail flow and are expected to introduce more leveraged products (like perpetuals) to their user bases.
- Filecoin: Mentioned as one of Wintermute’s earliest OTC counterparties, onboarding employees to help sell vested tokens.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion touched on the expansion of leveraged products: Robinhood is reportedly working with the CFTC to approve and offer perpetual futures to US clients, indicating a regulatory push to bring complex derivatives to broader retail audiences, mirroring trends seen in Europe.
6. Future Implications
The conversation suggests the financial landscape is rapidly converging: crypto-native firms are seeking outperformance beyond Bitcoin, while traditional finance players are cementing their role as major capital allocators in the asset class. Wintermute is strategically positioned to serve both sides, leveraging its expertise in both centralized exchange (CEX) and decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity to underwrite risk across a vast array of assets. Gaevoy’s personal ambition is noted: to become the richest man in the world by pushing the boundaries of financial innovation through Wintermute.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Crypto Professionals, Institutional Investors, Traders, and Market Structure Analysts who need granular insights into where institutional capital is flowing and how large-scale liquidity is managed in the current market cycle.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"If basically let's say Binance improved the latency to CME level, the last majority of those market makers will be competitively wiped out by basically like Jump, Citadel. Yeah. So in a way, it protects the crypto active, and also it makes markets more liquid on those exchanges as well because it basically levels the playing field quite a bit."
"Yeah, basically, yeah, how much we trade. So it's anyway between like five to $10 billion a day in volumes."
"It is pretty interesting. I told you guys the securities. Yeah, I can say it is probably like the most interesting one because, yeah, how we transition from the current legacy system, which operates on fiat currencies, which operates basically five days a week, doesn't operate on the weekends, is closed on like every holiday, for example—like, how do we transition from that to pure 24/7 with and solving for all the challenges with how do you handle corporate actions, how do you handle dividends, how do you handle like basically this 24/7 aspect crypto is super comfortable with, of course?"
"As a pro-crafter, we cannot stay focused on crypto forever. So we actually have to expand to TradFi. We have to expand to pretty much all asset classes."
"It's like the Russian '90s was very similar to crypto in the way. Okay? Because it was very, like, it was very hardcore capitalism, hardcore, like a lot of opportunities, a lot of different things available, but also a lot of risks as well."
"Bitcoin is here. It's all very vanilla. There are markets on the rail, there are markets on CME. It's very simple to price them; like everyone can do it. We have been active in all since forever... But altcoins, that's really where—when I first started hearing about you guys—that's really where I think you guys saw a wedge into the market: "We're going to go and we're going to serve a bunch of assets that maybe these other desks aren't going to do.""