The rise and fall of Jump Crypto

A secretive trading firm got itself a crypto arm and a 25-year-old whiz kid to run it. Then came the $40 billion Terra disaster.

- Leo Schwartz

The Zoom meeting at Jump Crypto was always running. And in May 2021, a scrum of employees was on the screen, discussing a mounting crisis.

The Chicago-based financial firm Jump Trading had made its name in the shadowy world of high-frequency trading during the early-2000s “Flash Boys” era, but lately, it had dipped its toes—and then its feet, legs, and torso— into the volatile cryptocurrency sector.

The firm had become a kind of silent partner for one of the most high-profile projects in crypto, an algorithmic stablecoin called TerraUSD that was meant to maintain a $1 peg through a complex mechanism tied to a related cryptocurrency called Luna—a careful dance that Jump helped coordinate on the back end by fulfilling trades. But despite the bluster of Terra’s swaggering founder, Do Kwon, the stablecoin was failing. It had lost its peg.

Jump stood to make millions on its deal with Terraform Labs, the TerraUSD developer—or the whole thing could quickly collapse. Jump’s cofounder, Bill DiSomma, was not ready to abandon his prize pig. So he hopped onto the crypto team’s always-on Zoom meeting, looking for a solution.

After a few minutes, one emerged: Kanav Kariya, a 25-year-old recent intern who was rising through the ranks of the digital assets division, joined the call, according to an employee’s later court testimony.

“I spoke to Do,” Kariya announced. “They’re going to vest us.”

What happened next would, quite literally, change the course of the crypto industry. Over the next week, Jump secretly bought up huge tranches of TerraUSD to create the appearance of demand and restore the coin’s value to $1, according to court documents. Meanwhile, Kwon “vested” Jump, meaning he agreed to deliver 65 million tokens of Luna to Jump at just $0.40, even though the coin would trade, at times, at more than $90 on exchanges.