Jump likely shuttered development arm, not trading — 1000x co-host

Crypto podcaster Jonah Van Bourg said he believes Jump Trading — the market maker widely blamed for Ether’s (ETH) Aug. 5 price crash — may have shuttered its blockchain development arm, according to a post on the X social media platform. 

Jump’s quantitative crypto trading business will probably keep operating as before, said Van Bourg, who co-costs the 1000x crypto podcast.

“If I had to guess, I'd say Jump has probably exited ‘building’ altogether,” Van Bourg said. “I’d also guess that their vanilla trading operation is still humming away and printing plenty of money.”

Jump came into the spotlight after unstaking approximately $480 million worth of wsETH and proceeding to sell roughly $400 million worth, according to posts by blockchain analytics service Lookonchain on the X platform.

Jump has not issued any public statements regarding the asset sales. It did not respond to requests for comment from Cointelegraph.

According to Van Bourg, Jump operated two main businesses in crypto: a quantitative trading desk and a Web3 development service.

“The trading side seemed pretty straightforward…This vertical behaved no differently than the sort of practice you'd have found inside Jane, Tower, Citadel, Flow, etc.,” Van Bourg said, referring to other well-known institutional market makers.

“Then there was the building side. 'Building,' in the frothy parlance of the 2021 picobull, is a euphemism for renting out [developers] in exchange for vast bags of locked” project tokens, Van Bourg said.

Kanav Kariya, the head of Jump Trading’s digital asset subsidiary, stepped down from his role in June following reports that Jump was being investigated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

In February 2022, Wormhole, a cross-chain bridge backed by Jump’s developers, suffered a high-profile exploit, which Jump ultimately sought to remedy by depositing ETH — worth about $321 million at the time — into the bridge.

In 2023, Jump was accused of collaborating with defunct decentralized finance platform Terra and profiting from the collapse of UST, Terra’s stablecoin.