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 at college.
“I bear in mind telling my lecturers I needed to take 10 minutes out of sophistication to test my portfolio when the market opened and closed,” Dariotis mentioned in an interview.
The kid buying and selling prodigy recalled how a trainer 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 is personal” — 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 interested in the symbols flashing inexperienced and pink on the CNBC morning present his dad and mom 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 at college, audaciously following the funding thesis of Warren Buffet, the following logical step was stepping into laptop programming. “After I was about 11 or 12 years previous, I took an curiosity in laptop programming, beginning with primary net improvement languages, after which evolving into Python and C++,” he recollects.
Listening to the way in which Dariotis tells it, his evolution towards constructing buying and selling infrastructure appears essentially 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 manner, he may 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 completely different components of portfolio building, optimization, threat administration and “actually stepping into the weeds of each factor of how quant markets function.”
It wasn’t lengthy earlier than a breakthrough got here: On the ripe previous age of 15, Dariotis says he mainly licensed his methods and began consulting for a significant Canadian financial institution, which was his first most important shopper. This was adopted by a number of different funding managers. Later, at a buying and selling and information 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 across the time Dariotis began 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 information 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 best 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 embody 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 actually need to be on the heart of how worth strikes,” Dariotis mentioned. “So we’re largely a tech supplier, quite than a monetary middleman, at a time limit the place all the things is basically changing into a market: prediction markets, the ‘perpification’ of all types of property, the tokenization of all types of property. The whole lot is changing into tradable so there’s a want for a core platform that connects all the things and does so in a performant method.”
So what’s Dariotis’ recommendation to different children who’re busily constructing billion-dollar firms of their bedrooms?
“You need to be versatile, keen to adapt and probably to pivot,” he mentioned. “We began off simply dealing with information and we may have simply stayed in our little information world and possibly carried out very effectively. You need to keep away from creating product silos — even when these could possibly be $100 million companies on their very own — after they have the potential to be price multiples extra by constructing a complete linked ecosystem.”
