Crypto Podcaster Jonah Van Bourg Believes Jump Trading May Have Shuttered Its Blockchain Development Arm

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

Crypto podcaster Jonah Van Bourg believes that Jump Trading, a market maker in the digital asset space, may have closed its blockchain development arm.

Van Bourg, who co-hosts the 1000x crypto podcast, shared his thoughts in a post on the X social media platform, following reports that Jump was largely responsible for Ether’s ( ETH) price crash on Aug. 5.

Van Bourg suggested that Jump's quantitative crypto trading operations would likely continue as before.

“If I had to guess, I'd say Jump has probably exited ‘building’ altogether,” he said, regarding the closure of Jump's blockchain development arm. “I'd also guess that their vanilla trading operation is still humming away and printing plenty of money.”

According to posts by blockchain analytics service Lookonchain on the X platform, Jump unstaked roughly wsETH, valued at about $480 million, and proceeded to sell around $400 million worth of ETH from Aug. 1 to 4.

The market maker has not made any public statements regarding the asset sales and 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.,” he 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, he added.

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 — valued at 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.

Related: Jump Trading sells another $29M Ether with $63M left to go — Is the bottom near?

The above is the detailed content of Crypto Podcaster Jonah Van Bourg Believes Jump Trading May Have Shuttered Its Blockchain Development Arm. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!