On The Brink with Castle Island - Yoann Turpin (Wintermute) on launching a cryptoasset market making firm (EP. 142)

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

Yoann Turpin, cofounder of Wintermute Trading joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Yoann's background in trading and how he made his way to trading cryptoassets His views on the evolving market structure for cryptoassets and where the industry is headed How important market makers are for new token launches The role of stablecoins and how these instruments are changing the landscape for traders Wintermute's decision to raise capital from VCs and how they see themselves are a technology firm To learn more about Wintermute Trading visit their website.

Today in the podcast, I had Yohan Turbin, co-founder of Wintermute, a market making and OTC firm based in London. I really enjoy conversations with folks who've traded different asset classes over the years. And I love hearing them compare and contrast their experience in those asset classes versus crypto assets. In a lot of ways, I think it gives a good idea of where this market is potentially headed in terms of infrastructure. So this conversation touched on a range of topics. We talked about the exchange landscape. We talked about lending, stable coins, specifically around. Tether and USDA. We talked about capital efficiency and how Wintermute thinks about that.

And we talked about what it's like to raise venture financing as a firm in this space. This was a fun conversation. So without further ado, here's Yohan Turbin. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market. And the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy

with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Yoan, thanks so much for joining today on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. We'd love to get into it. It's market making and OTC is definitely a big area of interest of ours and certainly a critical piece of infrastructure.

So excited to dive into what you guys are building at Wintermute. But maybe before we get into that, you could just start with a quick background on yourself and how you got into the space. My background is in derivatives first. So I mean, if you go quite a long way back, I started to get interested in trading at 12. My father let me use the whole minitel. So we'd just go and buy French stocks at the time. Any monkey would make money.

So it would be like 95 and 96. Got into options through an option book from the Matif that I got in my house. hands when I was 15. There's a local French newspaper called Investee, basically, so investing that was publishing this guy. So I got into that, got into futures. And at 18, somehow managed to get a bursurama that you may know, a French broker that was bought by a society now later, to sign me a letter for me to be a sophisticated investor to trade futures at 18. Somehow I got that across to the point that when I entered business school, my first three-month internship at business school in the first year of business school was essentially me gambling on CAC 40 futures and some

French stocks. So that was interesting. I didn't get a full grade because I didn't have a company description, which I'm still a bit annoyed about. Fast forward, 2004, 6, I spent time doing sales trading as well, really complex stuff, but maybe a bit too salesy and not on the trading side enough. So basically I took my first big role in trading at Optova. So that was on the 3rd of April 2006, started in a built different desk over there between a boombole shats, so very much what's called the long end. So the two, five, 10, 30 years in Europe and the US as market maker already, but as a market maker slash arbitrager, it was nearly already like a macro fund management if you want because we were listening to central bankers all day and trying to make good assess.

of like is what Trichet is saying or what Super Mario Draghi is saying is that does that make any sense and how is that reflected in prices and like should we or should we not take positions and even when you don't take positions as the market making side is that price correctly. So I helped build a few deaths there and then the company grew quite a lot. So Optiva is probably about a thousand people now. But while I was over there, it moved between 250 to about 700-ish people and it really turned into this sort of much more corporate as such. And I had very much been hired and part of this generation, there was a generation of more entrepreneurs in these prompt trading firms, there to build things and not necessarily there to be, therefore, you know, pure operational optimization, essentially. So I decided to leave Amsterdam to go to build my first firm in London that was in Volity to Arbitrarch Space under a family office. And it's at the time, so I'm coming to your answer, to the answer is that at the time I got familiar with cryptos in 2012, 13. We didn't really expand into crypto. because it was the time when MTGox would require three weeks just to move $30,000.

And sadly didn't delve more into the space at the time. I then went to, you know, exit that company in 2014, spent time on the venture side as well as part of the startup studio, invested quite a bit as an angel. So got much more acquainted with what I like to call the qualitative side of investing. And then I think the main incentive for me to come into the crypto space was to find, so 2017, I was building. something with a family office. Someone sitting basically two desks away from me was all over cryptos and we reviewed about 56 ICOs together. And cryptos really appeared to me as the very

nice middle ground between the qualitative aspects of startups and early stage projects and the listed projects. So also the things I could leverage on the quantitative side as well with my former trading experience. So came at the time with actually with that person who was sitting two desks away from me to, he was building his own micro fund and he wanted a crypto fund. And he wanted a crypto sleeve, and he wanted to allocate that to me at the time. We ended up not doing it, but at least it gave me the incentive to reconnect and find another trader and more of a senior developer. And that's how I reconnected with Yevgeny and with Howe, both ex-colleagues of Oluptova. And then Yevgeny was already building Wintermute. So that's how I, John went to

me or co-founded with a marginal lag, winter, so in 2018. That's a great background. I'm always fascinated with people that are in the trading space because some folks look at crypto as just another asset to trade. They don't care if it's a bar of gold or share of stock or a digital asset. It's just something that you can trade and you can find some interesting arbitrage opportunities. You kind of have the venture side as well. So I'm curious just your general view on this crypto market. I mean, how do you segment the assets? How do you think about the ones that are enduring? Or does it even matter? Are they just all assets that you can trade? I mean, it's too big elements to it, there was actually this exploratory element of if your market making, you remain

one market neutral. So you're not really actually just taking a bet on the future success of a certain token. And then two, it was more on the regulatory side that we were a lot more careful. So trading your own capital and so on was actually, I think, it's a much safer way of approaching the space. But yeah, exploring is a really important thing to know on, I mean, from a venture point of you, I would say there are a few parallels. There are a few big differences also. The few parallels around the fact that you should bet on the team mostly and that, you know, the ability of a certain team to be successful, I think it still applies vastly to many new projects in the crypto space just as it applies to any seed investment. I think that there are still very big

differences in the dynamics of short-termism from some token investors as opposed to venture investors looking at things much, much longer term and giving time to people to figure things out. So I think there's probably a big difference between sort of more venture and crypto investments. There are a few teams that manage with really long vesting and so on to actually maybe end up with more venture-like investors than people interested in the shorter moves. Going back to your question on trading or people coming from a trading world into the crypto space, some things apply, some things can be quite different. I think there's obviously the technical aspects of exchanging keys and a few things that people are just really, really not used to,

not really still to date having any form of, you know, prime broker and so on. I think it's really influenced winter mute in the way that we made a conscious decision of being venture funded as it. We see ourselves as a tech firm. But even beyond that, it wouldn't have been possible to go to and find a prime broker in cryptos. I would say, oh, let's take a few millions there and then we get 25 or 50 million. credit line. It doesn't work like this in the crypto space. So you can't really compare these things yet. Another big difference is integrations with every exchange and so on. That's a very different exercise in the crypto space as opposed to the traditional space. What to take frameworks

are quite unified. So maybe just for the listeners, could you give an overview of winter mute just in terms of the lines of business that you're in and what the primary focus of the firm is? So we are three years old and two months or so. We've VC backed. We trade three to five hundred million dollars a day or so. We are still very much a spot trading house. I think about 20% of our volume is it, you know, would be considered Delta one perpetual swaps slash futures. So we stay quite far away from, you know, a bit next and some other troubles that many may have nowadays. We're very focused on automation. So when I say it's a high frequency trading house, it is hundreds of thousands of orders a day. And it's just a very granderner.

trading. So we are slowly expanding into the OTC space and it happens mostly through, it will happen through an API that we're building and we have a few partners that we're building that with. But we're very, very focused on automation. So when you mention a spot trading and OTC at the start is a different kind of OTC. And we're also very focused on, we're very much a B2B business. We don't deal with any retail or when it's a sophisticated investor. It would just be a large family office or pretty much a fund, really. So that's what we trade and that's who we trade with. We are looking to do more things in the option space towards the end of this year with mini-consor parties. So it could be miners, could be wallets, could be structured products, could be crypto banks. That's fascinating. So as someone

who's been in the space since 2012 and observing these markets from the Gawks years onward, obviously we've had just a tremendous maturation of infrastructure to support what you're doing. But if you compare that to a traditional market that you've traded in in the past non-crypto, it looks a lot different. You mentioned prime brokerage being kind of one key infrastructure piece that's not there. What are some other categories of infrastructure that you think will have to exist if this continues to be a growing market? So I can give you a form of two-dimensional answer and an answer from my perspective, well, co-building winter mute really is it's been around. my role has been around recreating around us any partnership that could actually allow us to

replicate all the best practices that you could take from the traditional space. So when I said there's still no prime brokerage in this space, with adding two or three strategic partners, you could actually get to some sort of level where you would have, you know, favored preferred lenders and you'd have a bit of, you know, through them a bit of risk of a site or, you know, a way to double-check things. I think there's still a lot to do in the way that if you take the example of market-making, you still have exchanges that do the market-making themselves, which just wouldn't happen in the traditional space. And to compare further, I mean, the traditional space exchanges are barely make money on fees and then just the more data companies as such, if you look at the CME or

these. So there's still a long way to go. I think there's a positive interest in the space from institutions, from Porto de Jones. And I mean, if you look at how quickly the grace scale trust, actually, you know, gain more AUM every quarter is quite impressive. So I think recently from the perception of an asset class is definitely grown. That's definitely mature. And these COVID times have definitely helped the space to show itself as an interesting way of thinking of state balance sheets inflating to the infinity and how to protect, you know, from that. So I think there's this aspect that's definitely gained some traction among institutions. there are still, I think, one of the big things, and we see that with, you know, the issues around

or KX and all the exchanges in the past is that the custodial exchanges is still really something that you don't see anymore in traditional finance where you normally hold your funds with the prime broker or with a dedicated custodian, but you don't hold them on the exchange. And then you, so you have much more separation of the functions to dilute the risk a bit more. So I think there's still vast differences, but in terms of who's participating in the space, if you look at the progression from, I mean, from 2012, I can't really say, but let's say from 2015, 16 and onwards, there's definitely a very healthy progression between more maturity of the, anyone at any stage of the value chain. So more maturity from the primary market investors from very large-scale VCs investing, you know,

vast amounts of money in the space to improve the infrastructure. in many ways. And then finally, more of the hedge fund, the pension funds, or more traditional trading firms coming into the space. So that's quite positive for the space in general. What you're saying about the exchanges really resonates with me. I mean, if you look at the crypto exchanges and you just look at them through the lens of a traditional market structure, they're actually trying to be four or five different businesses in one. They're retail brokerages, their exchanges. They're actually playing a custodial role. Some of them are market making. So doing a lot of things that you would not see in one entity in a traditional market.

I guess the one super problematic piece of that is the custody piece, as you point out. So curious your view on where that's going over time. Do you think that we'll start to see more and more exchanges bifurcate and to really break up pieces of that value chain, outsource custody, maybe not compete for retail brokerage? How do you see that playing out over time? There are different dynamics in the custody because there's, I think, one fairly positive one in terms of, it also points to the main difference between the crypto space and some other traditional assets is that because of the dynamic of public private keys and because of the dynamic

around even more recently around staking and some very interesting dynamics around even defy lending and so on is there are services that are provided by the exchange that are essentially, it's more about convenience, but it's also about them evolving because they are, if you look at it from a venture point of view or if you were to invest in an exchange today, I mean, there's still hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of exchanges with a very, very long tail. And it's not necessarily a whole lot of money in exchange fees per se, unless you're, you know, maybe unless you're coin base or finance, but many of them have to reinvent themselves as well beyond being a venue where people trade. And I think, you know, there's pretty interesting development, more further development at

Coinbase, but also Cracken and some others who probably much more, if I take, you know, Cracken or even Blachshendon, I see them nearly more as venues where nearly more lenders and then you need more actually fulfilling these functions of similarly prime brokers than they are of an exchange. So some of it is positive. Some of it might need to be broken down to avoid a sort of a, to fill in the crypto space. And some of that is slowly being eaten at by the defy, you know, different, you know, defy up and down cycles of, you know, there's intermediation as well. How do you guys think about defy? Is that a place where you're actively trading in those markets? How does that compare to the centralized landscape at this point? We're quite

supportive of the tech. We're quite careful about where we trade, yeah, about proper auditing properly, the smart contracts. We've always taken a stance where if crypto succeeds, defi ultimately should take over because it's all about empowerment and disd intimidation and so on so defy should dominate the CFI as such now in the meantime I think as much as defy is useful to you know remove the custody risk so you take a risk on the contract you don't take the risk on the custody there's still better price discovery on the centralized exchanges so yeah we you know we keep a foot on both sides yeah that makes sense. Now, that sort of kind of leads me to the next question around just capital efficiency. And you'd

mentioned the lack of prime brokers and the role that they really play in some other markets, non-crypto, is facilitating just a capital efficiency for firms like yours. How do you think about that in the context of crypto and how can you be capital efficient in a world where you need to tie up crypto assets on various different exchanges in order to execute on them? Because of the frequency at which we trade and we trade in a very, you know, granular fashion, we're able to move funds around. Obviously, it's always dependent on the speed of a certain chain, but we're able to rebalance them many, many times a day. So a lot of our tech has been built to automatically rebalance and make sure there's enough inventory everywhere. So we're extremely capital efficient, but there's

also our business model that enables that. I do have to say that we spend years building that take investor to, hence why we consider ourselves more of a tech firm than initially a trading firm. That makes sense. I guess lending is another part of capital efficiency. How have you seen the lending market evolve in your time in the industry? Quite positively, actually. So I think, I mean, to take public examples that we've had an investment, you know, from blockchain local conventions mid-2019 and decided to lend to us at the time. I think most people in the space will have, you know, loan books from like 100 to 100, million dollars a goal and to up to a few billions. So I think the sales just shared their

figures. I think they crossed 1.6 billion recently. Zach at Rockfire is probably above the two billion now. So there's a lot of, there's this dynamic where you have, you know, hardlose money, and then they go and lend it back and they have to find a certain yield. So they lend it back to firm like hours and so on and obviously make a spread out of it. Some of them have a token. Some of them don't. Some of them have a community that share these games with. Some don't. But I think there's, in terms of sheer size, that's really a market. That's really, really grown quite dramatically because if, I mean, it's probably gone. I don't have actually figures at hand, but that's probably grown 5x this year, if not more. And I think it's been, some of it is just

existing crypto holders who just want to find the yield. So typically now, I know what BTC is going back up, but when it gets a bit quieter, everyone wants to lend. And also, it's probably a good way for institutions to enter the space. So as a comparable to traditional space, debt is about 10 times bigger. The debt for the market size for the debt markets is about 10x, the equity markets. So if you think of it that way, when do we have a 3 trillion debt market? I mean, it's not exactly the same. But essentially, yeah, there's been just in the sheer number of players in the space,

I think we've got 20 lenders on paper and we're adding two new counterparties, I mean, two new potential lenders. It doesn't mean we borrow from them, but two new potential lenders every month or two. And everyone seems to have at least 100 or 200 million or a two or one or 200 million longer. Yeah, it's been crazy just to see the growth in that market. I think people would be shocked at some of the market participants in there. Another market that's growing really exponentially over the past year or two is stable coins in both kind of the centralized stable coins, the USDCs of the world, as well as some of the decentralized stablecoin projects.

So curious how you think about that market and do you guys use stable coins to move assets around? Is it a big part of your strategy? And just what are you seeing in that market? It was probably a more prominent part of what we were doing about maybe a year and a half, two years ago or so. many more stables were starting. So there's a dynamic in stable coins where there's creation redemption. And because my co-founder, Yergeny's got, he has an ETF background. So in ETF, so in exchange traded funds, you have this same dynamic of creation of paper

and redemption. So you can create a certain asset to reflect the price moves of the underlying assets, or you can redeem it and just get the basket back if you want. So for stable coins, the equivalent is that you can issue your stable coins. You can send dollars to circle to get your USDC, and then when you send your USDC back, you should get some of your dollar back. So there's this dynamic of insurance and redemption. That's one of the aspects of stable cons that we were looking at. I think for some time there's been this aspect of people trading USDT more as a hedge.

It's more, you know, getting into USDT as nearly an implied short to Bitcoin. I think it's been, yeah, there's been, I mean, I don't want to comment on the press or also around USDT, but I had talked to Jean-Oau. We at the time around the USDT and the logic behind it. And then my understanding is that he was really coming from a tech perspective of everyone needs to rebalance and go back into a dollar equivalent. Banks are closed over the weekend. We're in cryptos. We can tokenize things. We can recreate a dollar market over the weekend.

It makes a lot of sense technologically. After this, there's some other challenges from various jurisdictions and regulatory side and so on. I won't comment on that. but it's interesting to see that it's been a big part of the growth of rebalancing. I mean, I think there's also been the growth of the stable coins has been incentivized by different things, by some friction around capital transfers in general. So I think that's really been, I mean, we've taken as equity investment in a company. I mean, we've taken USDC and the accounters were happy with it.

And yes, you more often, you know, than not, you just have to swap it back for US dollars and so on, but you can use stable coins for fairly regular world things. In terms of, I think there's another factor that's played a big role, is that it's still for most people, I mean, there are credit cards out there. There's some banking access, but for most people, there's not a fluid move of capital between the crypto space and the Fiat world.

And because of that, it just incentivizes people that when they want to move to the equivalent of cash, and at least they have stable coins to do it. Yeah, that's fascinating, that you were able to take USDC, as funding, I've heard several other teams have done the same. So I'm sure Jeremy O'Lear would love to hear that. I'm sure. One of the things that I've kind of pondered in the wake of the Bitmex enforcement action is just what would happen to tether if there was some sort of a similar

enforcement action. And without kind of speculating on the legalities of tether and whatnot, I just wonder, what are your views on if that asset just kind of ceased to exist in the market? what would the impact be on the overall crypto market? Would that be bad for the overall markets? Would it actually be positive in the sense that people would be forced to go out and buy a bunch of Bitcoin or what other type of asset they need to stay in the mix? How do you think that would impact just the overall landscape if it ceased to be an option to use Tether? I think there's a general market impact that could be similar to when there was an inquiry a few years ago when Tether actually stopped issuing and redeeming. To your point, I think it did cause,

a spike in Bitcoin as people were actually selling the USDT to actually buy Bitcoin at the time. It's more me remembering the press than necessarily looking at the data. So I don't necessarily quote me on that. I think there's enough stable coins out there, large enough to go and take that roll over. My understanding by non-legal advice, understanding on USDT though, is that the stable coins that got into trouble in the past got into trouble because they were not full one-to-one replication while, you know, allegedly there's a $1 backing for every, you know, one USDT. So if that's the case, I mean, it was very much the argument against, you know, stable coins that were not fully backed.

I don't really have the data on that, but I think that would be more the worry. I've been happily surprised many times on how quickly the crypto space could rebalance and find liquidity somewhere else. Even you mentioned bidmax earlier, a lot of derivatives, volume has moved to new venues. I mean, there's a few venues, which are like two. three-month-old that now will trade quarter of a billion of, you know, BTC perpetual like every day now. So it's quite impressive growth. I think even, you know, Hubey futures and so on over last year have grown quite a lot. I mean, Binance is the same. So I think this activity is not

disappearing. It's just, it's just shifting. One of the other things I was curious to get your take on is just the launch of various token projects over the past few months. And I guess we have file coin launched a couple weeks ago. We have some more layer ones that should be launching in the next few months here. So just generally speaking, how did these token projects engage with market making firms? Is this the type of thing where market makers are integral part of their launch strategy? How do you think about that? I think it vastly depends on the foundation or the team's understanding of how useful the market maker can be or would be. I think there is still in the space some teams confused about the role of the exchange,

because some teams would actually expect the exchange to do it. You know, most exchanges just ask when a team goes through the application for a listing process, the exchanges do ask, do you have a market maker and who's that and so on? We do that for a few, you know, known teams. And it's, I think the spaces, as, you know, we're discussing the space in the maturation, I said, I think it's really, really going the right way. I mean, this happens quite often when there's actually the CEO or the, you know, the foundation or someone in the team will have, you know, some trading.

background and will know well about what marketmaking is and how useful and essential it is, especially when you list for the first time. I think, I mean, the very high level is just useful and essential to avoid discrepancies across exchanges, especially when you list on more than one. Adding liquidity helps dampen, you know, the risk of price manipulation. It also, if your project that raised a lot of money before, it also means that if there's a competent market maker on the other side. If one of your seed investors or primary round investor wants to sell large quantities of the token, there's at least someone on the other side to make sure it doesn't affect the market too much. So it's all about making sure that the market is functional.

And ultimately, the exchange is just the room. And if you don't have a market maker, then you can have just people coming to a room wanting to buy or want it to sell, but no one else against it. Have you seen any kind of horror scenarios of that playing out where tokens have launched without having market making support and just ends up being a disaster? I haven't seen, at least the projects that we've dealt with, luckily, it's gone fairly well. But I think there have been events on the long tail where there's just a lack of preparation from the team or lack of communication from an exchange or so, where it's just, you know, disappointedly illiquid. The biggest risk, I would say, is you see teams, and it happened to some projects that we engage with, but much later after a listing, when they wanted a fairly professional marketmaker to help them, where the success of a token or the price of the token can be just driven by, let's say your project, you actually want to go and come to you at Fassil Island to raise equity. You want to have a discussion about a venture around and people, you have a token out there already and people will just judge your project based on the success of the token, which isn't necessarily

fair if it's not very liquid, because if it's not very liquid, you can assume that price discovery is just not there. So I think it's more this sort of downside risk that people who don't are not prepared well enough from liquidity and understanding this sort of things, don't necessarily realize. So you guys are active across all different types of venues, all different type of markets. Last time I talked to you last week, I think you had been up late dealing with something in Asia and you're obviously trying to coordinate with people in the United States too. So just in terms of the geographic focus, I guess the question is where are you guys seeing the most penetration, most uptick? What geography do you think this market is ticking off the most?

As Wentemue or as crypto in general? Just as a crypto industry in general. I think you still have a very strong, there's a strong Asian focus just because 80% of the mine are Chinese essentially, even if they may not reside in China, 80% of them are Chinese. I think today it's 70% of the total volumes still go through Chinese or Asian exchanges. There are some geographies where I've seen some more peculiar things around as exchanges in Brazil, typically where there's a lot more activity in the XRP. It's really seen as a good way to do remittance. There is some activity in South America or in Turkey, for example, but it's nowhere near. sort of Asia and some of the US exchanges.

I think there's interesting growth on our side in Europe, where we see many US or Asian exchanges who come to us for Euro and GDP and CHF pairs and so on. So actually you see more of that development across more of the local geographies. I think from what I understand, you know, the French or the German and so on, they just love to trade that BTC euro. So there are a few peculiarities, but yeah, if it's BTC driven, it depends more on miners. If it's, you know, more defy related and so on, and it tends to be quite global after that. So maybe just kind of shifting it back to Wintermute.

You mentioned at the outset that you guys have raised capital venture financing. So you have great investors on the Captable, Whitespeed, blockchain.com ventures. What's it been like to raise capital for a business like this? I guess in a traditional market, you wouldn't see necessarily a market-making firm or OTC firm go out and raise venture dollars per se. But obviously, that's definitely been a good path for you guys in the crypto space. So what's it been like? A couple of things.

The path has been interesting. But I think in the background of the rationale for us to raise venture funding has always been because we see ourselves as a tech firm. And we like the alignment of venture investors thinking long term. And it's probably a lot of things that we've done in defy. on that were much further out of the money calls, you know, pay nicely, but it's not something that we would have been able to do if we had been, you know, a fund or if we had been, you know, a traditional trading firm. So I think venture funding has been quite helpful to the company. Now, in terms of

raising the money, early on, I went, walked on streets of London in 2018 quite a lot to go and waste the first round. And it was essentially raised from the full alignment of planets of, I mean, you can imagine in the middle of crypto winter. It was from people I knew for some time, meaning trust was already built as trust in person. It's people who really understood the business model. It's people who had an experience as well with some emerging economies. So much more open to cryptos in that way. And yes, so we raised the first round through essentially Super Angels in 2018.

Blockchain.com is a very interesting partner from 2019 where Peter Smith has a very good understanding of market making, which helped actually Sam, who was a former Nespers. It's a completely different, I mean, you know the VC space pretty well. So, you know, someone from Nespers will have a very good understanding of marketplaces and, you know, BTC, but not necessarily of market making. And he's been really, really good at getting to understand our business and especially understand scalability. So you're completely right.

So it's a model that's less understood by VCs because you can't really apply the toolbox box of aggregation theory and like, you know, who exactly is your customer and so on. And there's this slight aspect of execution play where you do have to move quite quickly. On the other side, we're a fairly experienced team. And it wasn't too difficult between with our pedigray and with the results, you know, reached in 2019 already that, you know, to show this is fully our IP and this is where we go. But it's true that there was probably in 2018, 19, between the superangels invested in 2018 and the first round led by a blockchain.com ventures. There was a bit of a leap of face there. But it's not an easy exercise. But then it's the proof is very much in the pudding. And

I think we've shown that the model can work. Definitely. Well, I'm sure your investors are very happy just based on the growth that you guys have had over the past few years. So where can we send people to learn more about what you're building at Wintermute? Where can folks get in touch with you guys? So wintermute.com, there's an info box and so on. You can look us up over there. We are on Twitter. I'm not very present on Twitter, but I'm quite present on LinkedIn. So it's easier to just ping me on LinkedIn or so whether, please do leave a comment if you want to add me, if you're messaging, to have a very simple message about why you are

connecting or simply go through people like you. We've got a direct line. So that's just the right way to do it. I think it also depends a bit if you're a project or if you want to be more of a business partner and so on. Well, this has been a lot of fun. We'll have to have you back on in six or 12 months or so just based on all of the layer one protocols that are launching and how fast you guys are building. It'll be interesting to see what the market looks like next time we have you on.

So thanks so much for joining us today. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website.

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