From Classroom Trades to Billion-Dollar Daily Volumes: The Denis Dariotis Journey

While most children were memorizing multiplication tables in third grade, Denis Dariotis was checking his stock portfolio between classes. It’s an unconventional start to a life in finance, but one that foreshadowed a remarkable trajectory. Today, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of GoQuant has built a cryptocurrency infrastructure platform processing over a billion dollars in daily trading volume—a scale that would have seemed improbable for someone who had to ask his teacher for portfolio-check breaks just over a decade ago.

“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 recalled in a recent interview. One particular exchange stuck with him: a teacher wanted to peek at his computer screen to see what the third grader was trading. Dariotis politely declined, saying the information was private—a prescient moment foreshadowing his later creation of GoDark, an institutional-grade dark pool launched for traders seeking discretion in their transactions.

Trading Before His Teens: How Monthly Interest Concepts Led to Billion-Dollar Infrastructure

Growing up in Montreal, Dariotis’ first exposure to markets came from watching CNBC with his parents—the flash of green and red tickers across the screen captivated him. The connection between those symbols and money in his piggybank was inevitable. By age 15, he wasn’t just thinking about market movements; he had already licensed his trading strategies to a major Canadian bank and fielded job offers from hedge funds (which retreated when they realized his age).

But the real pivot came when Dariotis taught himself computer programming. Starting with basic web development around age 11 or 12, he progressed to Python and C++—languages that would become foundational to his later work. When he was 13, the inefficiency became obvious: manually scanning datasets consumed too much time. Why not automate the tedious work and spend more effort on strategy research and finding alpha?

This was his introduction to quant trading—the systematic, data-driven approach to markets. He dived into backtesting, portfolio construction, risk management, and the mechanics of how quantitative markets operate. By licensing his work to financial institutions, Dariotis proved that institutional-grade infrastructure didn’t have to be built by Wall Street veterans.

Spotting the Billion-Dollar Opportunity in Crypto

When Dariotis turned his attention to cryptocurrency markets, he identified what others had missed: despite billions of daily trading activity, crypto lacked the sophisticated infrastructure that traditional finance took for granted. Liquidity was fragmented across dozens of exchanges—centralized platforms, decentralized protocols, and OTC desks—each operating in silos. Latency delays in order book updates created inefficiencies that a properly designed system could eliminate.

The realization became clear: the future required building the entire stack from scratch. By January 2025, GoQuant had secured a $3 million pre-seed round followed by a $4 million seed round led by trading firm GSR (with backing from infrastructure provider Copper). The result: a platform now handling over a billion dollars in daily trading volume with approximately 80 employees distributed across the US, Europe, India, the Philippines, and Morocco.

GoQuant has expanded beyond its core trading tools. GoDark offers institutional-grade privacy for traders managing substantial positions, while GoCredit provides lending services with half a billion dollars of crypto loans in development. These products generate revenue streams that benefit from billion-dollar transaction volumes—where even modest fee structures create meaningful returns. For comparison, just one month of modest fees on a billion dollars in daily volume illustrates the scale of opportunity GoQuant has tapped into.

Building for an Increasingly Tradable World

“We really want to be at the center of how value moves,” Dariotis explained when discussing the platform’s vision. “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.”

His perspective reflects the broader crypto infrastructure thesis: as more assets become tokenized and tradable, core platforms connecting these markets become increasingly valuable. Centralized exchanges may grab headlines, but the technology providers powering billions in daily transactions operate with less fanfare and greater defensibility.

The Lesson From a Billion-Dollar Journey

For other young builders working on ambitious projects, Dariotis’ advice centers on adaptive strategy: “You have to be flexible, willing to adapt and potentially to pivot. 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.”

The boy who needed classroom breaks to check his portfolio had evolved into an infrastructure builder processing a billion dollars daily. His path suggests that the next generation of billion-dollar opportunities in crypto may come not from new tokens, but from platforms enabling the trillion-dollar ecosystem of transactions that increasingly characterize digital finance.