From Classroom Whisperer to Crypto Architect: How a Quiet 22-Year-Old Built a Trading Empire

Denis Dariotis wasn’t the kind of third-grader worried about multiplication tables. He was worried about market open. While his classmates sharpened pencils, he was trying to squeeze a few minutes from teachers so he could glance at his trading positions before the bell.

He laughs about it now, recalling how a curious teacher once tried to peek at his laptop to see what he was trading. He instinctively closed the screen and muttered, “Sorry… that’s private.” In hindsight, that moment feels almost poetic — the future creator of a crypto dark-pool platform fiercely guarding his market secrets before he could even ride a bike without training wheels.

Growing up in Montreal, Denis’ earliest window into finance came from the soft glow of CNBC in the family living room. The flashing red and green symbols fascinated him long before he understood what they meant. Eventually he realized those tiny symbols were tied to something very real: the money in his piggy bank.

His curiosity quickly evolved into something sharper. Fascinated by Warren Buffett’s principles, Denis began playing with investment ideas at an age when most kids were still learning long division. By 11, he had jumped headfirst into programming. First simple web languages… then Python… then C++. The path he followed wasn’t planned — it just unfolded naturally, one logical step at a time.

When he turned 13, another realization hit: he was wasting precious hours manually scanning data when his programming skills could automate the job. If computers handled the grunt work, he could focus on what he really loved — finding fresh strategies and identifying alpha in the noise. That was the spark that pushed him into the world of quant research, back-testing, risk frameworks, and the fine art of portfolio construction.

By 15, the “kid who checked his portfolio during class” was licensing trading strategies to a major Canadian bank. One consulting job rolled into another. At a New York data-science conference, a major hedge fund even tried to hire him on the spot — until someone asked his age. The room went silent when he replied, “I’m fifteen.”

Around that time, Denis started examining crypto markets more closely. What he found was an ecosystem bursting with activity yet starved of proper institutional infrastructure. Liquidity was chopped up and scattered across centralized exchanges, decentralized protocols, and OTC desks. Latency issues, inconsistent data, fragmented order books — it was chaos disguised as opportunity.

His instinct was simple: don’t patch the cracks. Build the foundation.

Fast-forward to January 2025, and his company — GoQuant — had already secured a $3 million pre-seed and a $4 million seed round led by GSR. Today, the platform processes more than $1 billion in daily trading volume with a workforce of nearly 80 specialists across multiple continents.

GoQuant has since expanded far beyond its data roots. The company now runs GoDark, an institutional-grade dark pool for crypto trading, and GoCredit, a lending arm currently managing nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of upcoming crypto loans. For Denis, the vision is much bigger than individual products.

He believes the world is shifting toward total tradability — where prediction markets, perpetual derivatives for unconventional assets, and tokenized everything form an interconnected trading universe. In that future, GoQuant aims to be the invisible engine powering value transfer behind the scenes.

“We’re building the core layer that can move value smoothly, securely, and at scale,” Denis says. “We’re a tech backbone, not a middleman. As more things become markets, the infrastructure keeping them connected becomes essential.”

When asked what he’d tell young founders trying to build something meaningful from a bedroom desk, his answer is remarkably grounded:

“Adapt. Don’t get stuck in one lane just because you started there. We could have stayed a pure data company and been fine. But building an ecosystem — where everything reinforces everything else — creates far more value than a handful of isolated products.”

For a kid who once fought for ten minutes of market time during recess, Denis Dariotis now runs a global crypto-tech powerhouse. And yet, he still speaks like someone quietly solving a puzzle — one that just happens to be worth billions.