Jump Crypto President Kanav Kariya on the Wormhole hack, market making, and crypto outlook

Introduction

Kanav is the President of Jump Crypto (@JumpCryptoHQ)

Jump Trading is one of the largest quant trading firms in the world and moved into crypto ~6 years ago

Grew into what Jump Crypto is today with 140 employees

Jump Crypto has been trading, building and investing in the space

Ledger: Who wins in a cage match, Alameda or Jump? Kanav: Depends on the rules!

Crypto was a trading problem to solve at first, sandbox environment for people to play with without messing up existing systems

As the space started to grow and as DeFi emerged there was a similarity to traditional environments and they got more involved

Own crypto on the their balance sheet not just when making plays

Intern to President

Jump is a very flat organisation usually three levels at most away from the top

A lot of freedom to work on things and push it further with more resources for what works

Kanav worked early on crypto projects that performed well and it led to getting his position and still building out the team

All in, all of the time. Always looking for engineers and ops people

Recently brought on a CMO

Sophisticated Competition

Jump and most traders are playing on different time horizons e.g. seconds to minutes

Smart contracts and aspects of DeFi are less competitive as firms are still apprehensive

Trading Systems

Some are highly automated others have more manual intervention. Alpha building process to build prediction models then plug it into an execution system

However there are things about the markets the models aren’t aware about that someone with pulse on the market would know

Mature risk management is in place taken from Jumps historical experience. A lot of it is hard coded in to prevent people putting on over sized positions

Not a lot going on with options markets, much smaller than everything else. Just because it hasn’t worked in the past doesn’t mean it won’t so will continue to watch

Narrative Surprises?

Built the first highly electronic OTC desk but the narrative didn’t play out to the expected extent. Institutional narrative was slower to play out - a lot of red tape to get through for institutions and waiting for regulatory clarity but believes it’s still going to happen

How long Uniswap V2 has continues to be incentivised continues to be surprising

Wormhole

CertusOne built the V1 and they were acquired by Jump. Wormhole connects 7 chains now transferring a lot of different information. Governed by 19 guardians, of which Jump Crypto is one

Wormhole had a 120K ETH hack recently

Developer noticed some discrepancies and they all jumped on a call to confirm the vulnerability then it was all hands on board to deal with it

Jump Crypto made the decision to backstop the funds

Hopes for the future

Phantom and Solana pay type stuff

You see the uses on twitter, looks great

No on knows what a seed phrase is! We need better UX

On the gaming and metaverse side - i just want to have fun and be able to play a game

On the research side - ZK seems promising would like stuff there

FINAL ALPHA

Harness the power of asymmetric upside

If you can see asymmetric upside and then place a lot of bets, you gmi