Denis Dariotis, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of cryptocurrency-focused buying and selling software program agency GoQuant, remembers the constraints and pressures of maximizing his buying and selling portfolio whereas he was nonetheless in the third grade at faculty.
“I bear in mind telling my lecturers I needed to take 10 minutes out of sophistication to verify my portfolio when the market opened and closed,” Dariotis mentioned in an interview.
The kid buying and selling prodigy recalled how a trainer wished to see his pc display and what he was buying and selling. However he shut the laptop computer saying, “No, I’m afraid that is personal” — an attention-grabbing presage of the crypto-focused dark pool app Dariotis released just last month.
Dariotis grew up in Montreal, the place his earliest reminiscence of the buying and selling world was being drawn to the symbols flashing inexperienced and crimson on the CNBC morning present his dad and mom had on in the background. It was solely a matter of time till he made the connection between the tickers on the TV display and the cash in his piggybank.
From his early days at faculty, audaciously following the funding thesis of Warren Buffet, the subsequent logical step was entering into pc programming. “After I was about 11 or 12 years previous, I took an curiosity in pc programming, beginning with fundamental net growth languages, after which evolving into Python and C++,” he remembers.
Listening to the manner Dariotis tells it, his evolution towards constructing buying and selling infrastructure appears the most pure factor in the world. By the age of 13 he realized he was spending an excessive amount of time scanning a ton of datasets, and wasn’t there a way to make use of his computing knowhow to automate that course of? That manner, he may spend extra time on researching buying and selling methods and getting alpha.
Having been hitherto unaware of quant trading, Dariotis started back-testing methods and researching totally different parts of portfolio development, optimization, threat administration and “actually entering into the weeds of each factor of how quant markets function.”
It wasn’t lengthy earlier than a breakthrough got here: At the ripe previous age of 15, Dariotis says he mainly licensed his methods and began consulting for a serious Canadian financial institution, which was his first most important consumer. This was adopted by a number of different funding managers. Later, at a buying and selling and knowledge science convention in New York, a big hedge fund tried to rent Dariotis on the spot.
“However then they had been like, ‘Dangle on a second, how previous are you?’ After which I used to be like, ‘I am 15,’ and so they kind of freaked out.”
This was additionally round the time Dariotis began wanting at crypto. The preliminary realization was how retail-orientated crypto markets are, missing any actual institutional-grade infrastructure. Crypto suffered severely from having fragmented liquidity unfold throughout many venues: centralized and decentralized exchanges, OTC desks.
Having utilized his knowledge market toolset to crypto, Dariotis noticed latency delays in the method that buying and selling venues up to date order books. He realized the greatest option to go was to construct the entire infrastructure stack.
By January of 2025, GoQuant had bagged a $3 million pre-seed spherical, plus a $4 million seed spherical led by crypto buying and selling agency GSR. It now handles over $1 billion in buying and selling quantity every day, and employs about 80 employees unfold throughout the U.S., Europe, India, the Philippines and Morocco.
Current additions to the model embrace the GoDark institutional-grade darkish pool, and a GoCredit lending platform which has about half a billion {dollars} of crypto loans in the pipeline.
“We actually need to be at the middle of how worth strikes,” Dariotis mentioned. “So we’re largely a tech supplier, moderately than a monetary middleman, at a cut-off date the place every part is actually turning into a market: prediction markets, the ‘perpification’ of all kinds of property, the tokenization of all kinds of property. All the pieces is turning into tradable so there’s a want for a core platform that connects every part and does so in a performant method.”
So what’s Dariotis’ recommendation to different youngsters who’re busily constructing billion-dollar corporations of their bedrooms?
“It’s a must to be versatile, prepared to adapt and doubtlessly to pivot,” he mentioned. “We began off simply dealing with knowledge and we may have simply stayed in our little knowledge world and possibly finished very properly. You need to keep away from creating product silos — even when these may very well be $100 million companies on their very own — after they have the potential to be price multiples extra by constructing a complete related ecosystem.”
