Jump Trading

Jump Trading’s two founding partners, Paul Gurinas and Bill DiSomma, met in the Deutsche Mark futures pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and by 1997 they were working together to trade a then-new contract, the E-mini S&P index future: one partner traded in the S&P pit while the other traded the mini contracts on a handheld computer issued by the exchange. The two founded Jump Trading in 1999. The firm is a proprietary trading firm, meaning its traders trade the founding partners’ money.⁠[1][1][1][1]

On December 22, 2000, Jump Trading became a participant of the Chicago Stock Exchange (later NYSE Chicago) and subject to its disciplinary jurisdiction; the firm is a registered broker-dealer with its principal office in Chicago, Illinois.⁠[2]

By early 2006, Jump Trading had 50 traders buying and selling a variety of contracts by computer. The partners said at the time that although the firm started on the open-outcry trading floor, it was now fully committed to electronic trading; chief operating officer Bob Kirkland said open outcry could not match the number of trades possible electronically.⁠[1][1][1]

On November 2, 2010, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Gary Gensler met with Jump Trading’s Matt Schrecengost, Bill DiSomma, and Paul Gurinas. After discussing high-frequency trading and the market events of May 6 that year, they discussed defining spoofing as a disruptive trade practice and transparency and access to swap execution facilities (SEFs), topics tied to the CFTC’s rulemakings on SEF registration and disruptive trading practices.⁠[3][3]

In late February 2014, a $25 million challenge gift from Jump Trading launched Jump ARCHES (Jump Applied Research for Community Health through Engineering and Simulation), a program of joint research between the Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center at OSF HealthCare in Peoria and the University of Illinois College of Engineering. The OSF Healthcare Foundation was to raise a matching amount toward a $50 million endowment, and the University of Illinois was to provide annual support equivalent to a $12.5 million endowment. The Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center, a collaboration of OSF HealthCare and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, replicates hospital care settings from the exam room to the operating room for clinical training.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On May 3, 2018, the lead of one Jump Trading team edited the code of an algorithm used to net out positions before the close, and the revised code went into production the next day. An error the regression tests had not caught meant that before the close on May 4, instead of reducing positions to near zero, the algorithm produced 674 unintended executions and accumulated short positions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, putting the firm below its net capital requirement for several hours; the firm restored compliance the same day through a block trade with its clearing broker and self-reported the violation.⁠[2][2][2][2]

NYSE Chicago found that Jump’s single-order controls only reduced erroneous orders to the maximum size rather than blocking them, and that its capital limits counted only executed orders and ignored pending limit-on-close orders, in violation of the SEC’s market access rule (15c3-5), the net capital rule (15c3-1), and exchange supervision rules. Jump settled without admitting or denying the findings, was censured and fined $250,000, and had to certify within 90 days that it had fixed the risk-control deficiencies.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

According to the findings in a later SEC settlement order, Tai Mo Shan Limited, a Cayman Islands company in Jump’s crypto business, began entering into agreements with Terraform Labs in November 2019 to receive LUNA in exchange for services: instead of a fee, it borrowed a large number of LUNA from Terraform, typically for two years, after which it could return the tokens at no cost or buy them at the agreed price. The first agreement was signed on November 19, 2019, about seven months after LUNA’s April 24, 2019 launch on the Terra blockchain and before its wider availability on trading platforms.⁠[5][5][5][5]

The same order found that on May 23, 2021, when the price of TerraUSD (UST) began falling sharply below its $1 peg, Tai Mo Shan and Terraform made a verbal agreement under which Terraform would fully vest the remaining LUNA owed to Tai Mo Shan; that day and in the following days, Tai Mo Shan departed from its historical trading pattern, built a large long position in UST, and bought more than $20 million of UST, trading in a manner consistent with trying to push UST back to its $1 peg. The agreement was memorialized on July 21, 2021; Tai Mo Shan received monthly installments of unlocked LUNA from September 2021 and made a profit of about $73.45 million selling this additional LUNA.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

On September 13, 2021, Jump Trading Group formally launched its crypto brand Jump Crypto, calling it a project six years in the making that began as an intern project at Jump’s research lab at the University of Illinois. The group described itself at the time as having more than 1,000 employees worldwide and as having grown from the CME pits into a research-driven quantitative trading firm. Jump Crypto started with more than 80 people, working on software infrastructure for blockchain ecosystems as well as trading and market making, with Kanav Kariya as president; he had previously been a software engineering intern, quantitative researcher, and director of strategic initiatives for digital assets at Jump.⁠[6][6][6][7][7][8]

The launch post listed Jump Crypto’s work at the time: governance discussions on the parameters of Terra’s stability mechanism, serving as one of the guardians of the Wormhole cross-chain network, market making on Serum, an order-book exchange on SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry, and helping create the Pyth Network oracle. Shortly before the launch, Jump Trading Group had acquired Certus One, a Berlin-based provider of infrastructure for proof-of-stake blockchains and the developer of Wormhole.⁠[6][6][6][6][7][9]

At 18:26 UTC on February 2, 2022, an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the contract of the Wormhole cross-chain bridge and minted 120,000 wrapped ether (wETH), worth about $320 million; the vulnerability was patched about six hours later. At 13:08 UTC on February 3, the Ethereum-side contract had been refilled and all wETH were again backed 1:1, and the bridge came back online shortly afterward. Jump Trading announced the same day that it had replaced Wormhole’s lost funds; Jump Crypto deposited an equal amount of ether into the bridge, worth about $321 million at the time of the hack.⁠[9][9][9][10]

On May 9, 2023, investor Taewoo Kim, on behalf of a proposed class, sued Jump Trading, LLC and Kanav Kariya in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleging violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations and unjust enrichment. The complaint alleges that Jump manipulated the markets for UST and aUST to maintain UST’s $1 peg and in return received more than 61.4 million LUNA from Terraform at a discount of more than 99% to market price, reselling them at a profit of more than $1.28 billion. These are one-sided allegations by the plaintiff.⁠[8][8][8]

On June 24, 2024, Kanav Kariya announced on social media that he was stepping down as president of Jump Crypto, saying he would focus on his personal life while looking for his next venture. At the time there were widespread reports that the CFTC was investigating Jump Crypto; the scope of the investigation was not public and the regulator had made no findings.⁠[10][10][10]

On December 20, 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) instituted and simultaneously settled cease-and-desist proceedings against Tai Mo Shan Limited, a Cayman Islands company wholly owned by Jump Crypto Holdings LLC that is not registered with the SEC. The SEC found two violations: first, from January 2021 to May 2022 Tai Mo Shan sold LUNA it obtained from Terraform through one-sided trading on U.S. platforms, acting as a statutory underwriter in violation of the registration requirements of Sections 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act of 1933; second, given Terraform’s prior statements, its UST purchases during the May 2021 de-peg misled the market into believing the algorithmic mechanism was stabilizing UST, violating Section 17(a)(3), which can rest on negligence.⁠[5][5][5][11][5]

Under the settlement, Tai Mo Shan agreed to pay $73,452,756 in disgorgement, $12,916,153 in prejudgment interest, and a $36,726,378 civil penalty, about $123 million in total, and to cease and desist from violating those provisions; a Fair Fund was created to distribute the money to harmed investors to the extent feasible. Tai Mo Shan neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s findings, and the findings are not binding on any other person. Then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler said the case was a reminder that crypto markets had too often seen significant investor losses due to fraud.⁠[11][11][5][5][5][11]

On June 18, 2025, Jump Crypto said it had kept a low profile for several years but never stopped building, and reintroduced its projects: as a core contributor to Pyth, which had more than 100 data publishers and supported more than 100 blockchains; Wormhole, which had carried more than 1 billion cross-chain messages; Firedancer, a second independent high-performance validator client for Solana whose idea traced back to Jump Crypto starting to trade on Solana in 2020; DoubleZero, a fiber-optic network project started with Austin Federa and Malbec Labs; and its in-house self-custody wallet team and security research team, which had been spun out as Cordial Systems and Asymmetric Research. Jump Crypto stressed that none of these networks were controlled by Jump and all were open source.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12][12][12]

Jump Crypto also said that Jump had engaged directly in Washington policy work for the first time, having submitted the month before the first comment letter in Jump Trading Group’s history, offering its views on how U.S. securities laws could better accommodate digital assets.⁠[12][12]

On December 18, 2025, Todd Snyder, the court-appointed plan administrator overseeing the wind-down of Terraform Labs, sued Jump Trading, co-founder William DiSomma, and former Jump Crypto president Kanav Kariya in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, seeking $4 billion in damages. He alleges that Jump used a series of undisclosed agreements with Terraform to extract billions of dollars in value while helping conceal structural weaknesses in TerraUSD, and that after the May 2021 de-peg it renegotiated its contracts to remove vesting restrictions and sell LUNA faster. These are the plaintiff’s allegations; as of December 19, 2025, the complaint had not appeared in public repositories.⁠[13][13][13][13][13]

On August 13, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Kim v. Jump Trading (No. 25-1964), affirmed the district court’s denial of the defendants’ motion to compel arbitration. The defendants argued that because the plaintiff had signed an arbitration agreement with a third-party trading platform, equitable estoppel required him to arbitrate; the court held that the defendants could not invoke equitable estoppel because there was no evidence they had relied on the plaintiff’s representations.⁠[14][14][14]

On October 8, 2026, Catalyst, a startup building AI trading agents for retail investors, announced a $30 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Jump Trading, Peak XV PartnersPeak XV PartnersPeak XV Partners is a venture capital firm that grew out of Sequoia’s India and Southeast Asia business, investing across the seed, venture and growth stages in markets including India, Asia-Pacific and the United States. The firm began operating as Sequoia Capital India in 2006 and adopted its current name and became independent in 2023.Open the full entry, Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry, AntiFund, CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry, and Premji InvestPremji InvestPremji Invest is an investment firm established by Azim Premji in 2006, operating across private and public markets in India and the United States, with investment returns primarily supporting the philanthropic work of the Azim Premji Foundation. Its investment areas include technology, financial services, consumer, healthcare and industrials.Open the full entry. In his post on the deal, Sequoia partner George RobsonGeorge RobsonGeorge Robson is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on seed and early-stage investing, who has led or co-led financings in fintech and other companies including Pennylane, Zefir, nsave, Tola, Aspora, WithCoverage, and Catalyst. Before joining Sequoia, he worked at Morgan Stanley and Revolut.Open the full entry noted that Catalyst’s team includes tech leads from Citadel, Citadel SecuritiesCitadel SecuritiesCitadel Securities is an American market maker founded in Chicago in 2002 by Ken Griffin and partners and headquartered in Miami, providing liquidity to institutional and retail investors across a range of financial products. It is a separate company from Citadel, the hedge fund Griffin founded in 1990.Open the full entry, Hudson River TradingHudson River TradingHudson River Trading is a proprietary trading firm headquartered at 3 World Trade Center in New York. Through its broker-dealer HRT Financial LP it trades for its own account and makes markets in US equities, options and futures, and it also handles part of the customer order flow of the retail broker Robinhood.Open the full entry, and Jump Trading.⁠[15][16][17][17]

On October 12, 2026, a co-founder of Itô, a startup built around trading access to computing power, announced that Itô’s entire founding team was joining Jump Trading to launch and run a new compute trading desk that trades access to computing power and AI inference capacity, starting with mid-market contracts that mostly run for three to five years.⁠[18][18][18]

On October 16, 2026, Jump Crypto described its security work on Firedancer: after three years of development and testing, it ran a $1 million public audit competition that May, which received 809 reports from 162 researchers in 30 days, 127 of them unique security submissions; Firedancer had since launched on Solana mainnet and, at the time of writing, secured about 15% of the network’s stake. Jump Crypto also announced that for the following month it would double all bug bounty rewards and triple rewards for findings related to Alpenglow, Solana’s upcoming network upgrade.⁠[19][19][19]

As of October 2026, Jump Trading describes its strategies as ranging from high-frequency trading and statistical arbitrage to discretionary macro, trading equities, options, credit, commodities, digital assets, and futures; it operates three purpose-built research data centers and more than 100 co-located compute environments near exchanges worldwide, and develops its own ASIC and FPGA hardware for low-latency workloads. Its offices include Chicago, New York, Austin, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Bristol, Mumbai, GIFT City, Sydney, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Paris.⁠[20][20][21][22]

Its publicly disclosed regulated entities include broker-dealers Jump Trading, LLC and Jump Execution, LLC, Jump Trading Futures, LLC, Jump Trading Europe B.V. in Europe, and Jump Trading International, Ltd. in the UK. The group also includes the crypto business Jump Crypto and the venture firm Jump Capital; Jump Crypto states that it does not operate any business that accepts funds from external investors.⁠[23][23][23][22][24]

Jump Trading: Official website: https://www.jumptrading.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Jump Crypto: Official website: https://jumpcrypto.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Jump Crypto: Official account: https://x.com/jump_ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

Jump Capital: Official website: https://jumpcap.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22][25]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jumptrading (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jump-trading (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JumpTradingGroup (opens in a new window)⁠[22]