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 within the third grade in school.
“I remember telling my teachers I had to take 10 minutes out of class to check my portfolio when the market opened and closed,” Dariotis stated in an interview.
The kid buying and selling prodigy recalled how a instructor needed to see his laptop display and what he was buying and selling. However he shut the laptop computer saying, “No, I’m afraid that’s private” — an fascinating presage of the crypto-focused darkish pool app Dariotis launched simply final 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 mother and father had on within 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 in school, audaciously following the funding thesis of Warren Buffet, the following logical step was entering into laptop programming. “When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I took an interest in computer programming, starting with basic web development languages, and then evolving into Python and C++,” he remembers.
Listening to the way in which Dariotis tells it, his evolution towards constructing buying and selling infrastructure appears probably the most pure factor on the planet. 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 approach, he might spend extra time on researching buying and selling methods and getting alpha.
Having been hitherto unaware of quant buying and selling, Dariotis started back-testing methods and researching totally different parts of portfolio development, optimization, danger administration and “really getting into the weeds of every element of how quant markets operate.”
It wasn’t lengthy earlier than a breakthrough got here: On the ripe outdated age of 15, Dariotis says he principally licensed his methods and began consulting for a serious Canadian financial institution, which was his first fundamental shopper. This was adopted by a couple 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.
“But then they were like, ‘Hang on a second, how old are you?’ And then I was like, ‘I’m 15,’ and they sort of freaked out.”
This was additionally across the time Dariotis began taking a look 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 within the method that buying and selling venues up to date order books. He realized one of the simplest ways 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.
Latest 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 within the pipeline.
“We really want to be at the center of how value moves,” Dariotis stated. “So we’re largely a tech provider, rather than a financial intermediary, at a point in time where everything is essentially becoming a market: prediction markets, the ‘perpification’ of all sorts of assets, the tokenization of all sorts of assets. Everything is becoming tradable so there is a need for a core platform that connects everything and does so in a performant manner.”
So what’s Dariotis’ recommendation to different children who’re busily constructing billion-dollar corporations of their bedrooms?
“You have to be flexible, willing to adapt and potentially to pivot,” he stated. “We started off just handling data and we could have just stayed in our little data world and probably done very well. You want to avoid creating product silos — even if these could be $100 million businesses on their own — when they have the potential to be worth multiples more by building a whole connected ecosystem.”
