This is our 9th year in crypto Nine years providing liquidity and staying active through every market condition Today we're launching Armitage Our take on vault curation, starting with two USDC vaults on @Morpho

lol whatttt

The fastest-growing segment of our OTC derivatives business has been options overwriting and yield generation. To support this, we've launched a native dashboard within our single-dealer platform - sharing indicative pricing on a broad range of assets, not just majors. >> wintermute.com/node

For the avoidance of doubt.... > The charterers would be the payees who are mostly barred by OFAC (UST) from sending crypto (or anything) to IRGC. > Net marginal impact (assuming they can do this with US blessing/'JV') would be $20-$21m a day (at $1 per barrel as per announcement) > This is not a 'great new use case' for Cryptocurrency

The quantum arc begins

Applications open for Analyst #4

For those who love to speculate on gamma squeezes on potential volatility, MMs are short at current spot, but modest amounts that (as a whole) won't accelerate Spot. MMs are long the upside Calls, given to them by Funds who sell Calls for yield and to finance Put protection. If Funds are short Calls, it should be because they are long Spot AUM, so they limit their upside, but on approaching short Call limits, the short can be rolled up without too much issue. No drama on current positioning, but I would expect demand for optionality ahead of erratic Trump-imposed deadlines if volatility is expected. Spot/News will lead.

In prior cycles, a smaller universe of assets pushed traders into perps in high FDV tokens. This led to hedges carrying positively (perps > spot) on secondary sales - a structural quirk which has now given way to $500m - $1bn in altcoin unlocks on a weekly basis. Structural oversupply has led to these 'inefficiencies' being ironed out and forward rates adjusted lower.

With these papers out in the open, I can see PQC roadmap quality becoming a real factor in allocation decisions. Those looking to hedge the quantum threat have a few 'liquid' ways to structure a L/S trade outside of ETH (those with) vs BTC (those without). Some are already outperforming on the session.

Today is a monumentous day for quantum computing and cryptography. Two breakthrough papers just landed (links in next tweet). Both papers improve Shor's algorithm, infamous for cracking RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. The two results compound, optimising separate layers of the quantum stack. The results are shocking. I expect a narrative shift and a further R&D boost toward post-quantum cryptography. The first paper is by Google Quantum AI. They tackle the (logical) Shor algorithm, tailoring it to crack Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. The algorithm runs on ~1K logical qubits for the 256-bit elliptic curve secp256k1. Due to the low circuit depth, a fast superconducting computer would recover private keys in minutes. I'm grateful to have joined as a late paper co-author, in large part for the chance to interact with experts and the alpha gleaned from internal discussions. The second paper is by a stealthy startup called Oratomic, with ex-Google and prominent Caltech faculty. Their starting point is Google's improvements to the logical quantum circuit. They then apply improvements at the physical layer, with tricks specific to neutral atom quantum computers. The result estimates that 26,000 atomic qubits are sufficient to break 256-bit elliptic curve signatures. This would be roughly a 40x improvement in physical qubit count over previous state-of-the-art. On the flip side, a single Shor run would take ~10 days due to the relatively slow speed of neutral atoms. Below are my key takeaways. As a disclaimer, I am not a quantum expert. Time is needed for the results to be properly vetted. Based on my interactions with the team, I have faith the Google Quantum AI results are conservative. The Oratomic paper is much harder for me to assess, especially because of the use of more exotic qLDPC codes. I will take it with a grain of salt until the dust settles. → q-day: My confidence in q-day by 2032 has shot up significantly. IMO there's at least a 10% chance that by 2032 a quantum computer recovers a secp256k1 ECDSA private key from an exposed public key. While a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC) before 2030 still feels unlikely, now is undoubtedly the time to start preparing. → censorship: The Google paper uses a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof to demonstrate the algorithm's existence without leaking actual optimisations. From now on, assume state-of-the-art algorithms will be censored. There may be self-censorship for moral or commercial reasons, or because of government pressure. A blackout in academic publications would be a tell-tale sign. → cracking time: A superconducting quantum computer, the type Google is building, could crack keys in minutes. This is because the optimised quantum circuit is just 100M Toffoli gates, which is surprisingly shallow. (Toffoli gates are hard because they require production of so-called "magic states".) Toffoli gates would consume ~10 microseconds on a superconducting platform, totalling ~1,000 sec of Shor runtime. → latency optimisations: Two latency optimisations bring key cracking time to single-digit minutes. The first parallelises computation across quantum devices. The second involves feeding the pubkey to the quantum computer mid-flight, after a generic setup phase. → fast- and slow-clock: At first approximation there are two families of quantum computers. The fast-clock flavour, which includes superconducting and photonic architectures, runs at roughly 100 kHz. The slow-clock flavour, which includes trapped ion and neutral atom architectures, runs roughly 1,000x slower (~100 Hz, or ~1 week to crack a single key). → qubit count: The size-optimised variant of the algorithm runs on 1,200 logical qubits. On a superconducting computer with surface code error correction that's roughly 500K physical qubits, a 400:1 physical-to-logical ratio. The surface code is conservative, assuming only four-way nearest-neighbour grid connectivity. It was demonstrated last year by Google on a real quantum computer. → future gains: Low-hanging fruit is still being picked, with at least one of the Google optimisations resulting from a surprisingly simple observation. Interestingly, AI was not (yet!) tasked to find optimisations. This was also the first time authors such as Craig Gidney attacked elliptic curves (as opposed to RSA). Shor logical qubit count could plausibly go under 1K soonish. → error correction: The physical-to-logical ratio for superconducting computers could go under 100:1. For superconducting computers that would be mean ~100K physical qubits for a CRQC, two orders of magnitude away from state of the art. Neutral atoms quantum computers are amenable to error correcting codes other than the surface code. While much slower to run, they can bring down the physical to logical qubit ratio closer to 10:1. → Bitcoin PoW: Commercially-viable Bitcoin PoW via Grover's algorithm is not happening any time soon. We're talking decades, possibly centuries away. This observation should help focus the discussion on ECDSA and Schnorr. (Side note: as unofficial Bitcoin security researcher, I still believe Bitcoin PoW is cooked due to the dwindling security budget.) → team quality: The folks at Google Quantum AI are the real deal. Craig Gidney (@CraigGidney) is arguably the world's top quantum circuit optimisooor. Just last year he squeezed 10x out of Shor for RSA, bringing the physical qubit count down from 10M to 1M. Special thanks to the Google team for patiently answering all my newb questions with detailed, fact-based answers. I was expecting some hype, but found none.

2026 version of a snow day

“so it turns out it was Jane Street all along, it wasn’t my horrible risk management, I might make it after all, I’ve got some good idea-“ “peter im getting married”

If you want to properly understand how crypto works, start here Big kudos to @lawmaster and Wintermute’s @FrankResearcher and @emparedad0 for pulling this together Our research team was glad to contribute, as we’ve felt for a while that something like this was genuinely needed

Unlike TradFi, most Crypto data is free and publicly available - so there's no excuse not to check the narratives being pushed via media coverage. Kudos to Alex for actually looking under the hood. Replicated his work (in BTC) and got similar results... there's normal intraday noise around the US equity open, which you'd expect at a high-volume transition point. The 'narrative' of a consistent, tradeable dump around US open simply doesn't exist.

With just under a week to go, those at the forefront of the industry are asking the UK one question. Do we want to remain competitive? Others are innovating with Stablecoins and it’s about time we do the same👇

Bravo @Citrini7, bravo!

The Big Short 2 is just Michael Burry getting $2b a year from his newsletter that he rolls directly into VIX call options until the republic collapses

The future of finance in the UK is being capped. As we approach the stablecoin inquiry, we’re bringing together the people shaping the debate to tackle the questions that matter 🛡️Hosts: • @CryptoAdEnnab, @StandWCrypto_UK, Director • Soledad Contreras, @Coindesk, Director of Partnerships 🎙️Speakers: • @DrNickA, @JitoFDN, Head of Governance • @JO_Wintermute, @Wintermute_t, Head of OTC • @Jolyonchain, @Flight3official, Founder • @_clemens__, @Base, Country Lead UK & Western Europe 📍 Hosted by @StandWCrypto_UK 🗓️ February, 27th, 2026 | 1:00 PM GMT 🔔 Turn on notifications so you don’t miss when we go live