Once a high-frequency trading giant at the forefront of the industry, Jump Crypto has faded into silence following a series of intense upheavals. Now, this once-dominant hidden force in on-chain liquidity is attempting to return to the center stage under its new identity as a “encryption infrastructure builder.”

Recently, Jump has made a high-profile statement, announcing its full transformation into a core promoter of on-chain infrastructure, and has rarely disclosed its progress in lobbying for U.S. encryption policies, attempting to rebuild market trust in the new cycle of encryption through technological innovation and regulatory cooperation.

Transforming into an infrastructure builder, first participating in U.S. encryption policy lobbying.

On June 20, Jump Crypto, which has been low-key for a long time, rarely spoke out and officially announced its reintroduction to the world as a “builder of encryption infrastructure.” This company, regarded as one of the largest participants in crypto trading, is transitioning from a behind-the-scenes trading giant to a core promoter of on-chain infrastructure.

In a public statement released on the official website, Jump Crypto reviewed that it has been low-key in the past few years but has never stopped building, with the team consistently focused on identifying and overcoming the core bottlenecks that restrict the performance and scalability of encryption systems. “We do not sit in an ivory tower talking about the future ten years from now; we start with the hardest problems. History tells us that building itself will give rise to more building,” Jump wrote.

Jump emphasized its core contributions in multiple projects such as Pyth, Wormhole, Firedancer, and DoubleZero, stating that although these projects have different technical directions, they all originated from the technical limitations encountered by Jump in real on-chain transactions. It is precisely this “transaction-driven development” approach that has allowed the Jump team to evolve from liquidity providers to key drivers of encryption infrastructure.

However, Jump has repeatedly emphasized in its statement that, despite playing a core contributor role in multiple infrastructure projects, it does not possess control over these networks. “We firmly believe that the essence of decentralization is that no single entity has ‘unilateral control’. Therefore, the protocols we build are not only open source but are even completely open source and can be freely forked. In our view, the decentralized approach can take many forms (validators, token governance, etc.), but the core criterion always remains: is there the ability to unilaterally modify the protocol?”

At the same time, Jump has also laid out security infrastructure, including the self-developed self-custody wallet operating platform Cordial Systems, which can provide enterprise-level digital asset wallet solutions for Jump and multiple centralized exchanges; the internally incubated security team Asymmetric Research has assisted in recovering over $5 billion in potential risks and has dealt with more than 100 security incidents.

It is worth noting that Jump’s high-profile statement this time is not only a “clarification” of its role but also reveals its first active participation in advising regulatory policies. Over the past few decades, Jump’s parent company, Jump Trading, has rarely appeared in the public policy arena. Last month, Jump Crypto submitted a policy opinion letter to the SEC, marking the first time in the history of its parent company Jump Trading that it has publicly expressed its stance on public policy, sharing their views on how U.S. securities laws should adapt to the era of digital assets, and calling for the introduction of common-sense reforms to eliminate the regulatory ambiguity and uncertainty widely felt in the industry.

“Now is the best window period to reconstruct financial infrastructure and even the way organizations coordinate. It is not only the maturity of technology but also the shift in policies that has brought this industry to a critical turning point,” Jump pointed out.

After experiencing multiple crises and suffering significant damage, seeking a comeback after the U.S. regulatory environment warms up.

Jump Crypto was once the flagship force of the Wall Street quantitative legend Jump Trading in the world of encryption. However, after being embroiled in a series of controversies, including the UST manipulation scandal, the FTX bankruptcy crisis, and the Wormhole hacker attack, this high-frequency trading giant active on the front lines of encryption faced a reputation crisis and financial pressure, choosing to gradually fade out of the industry’s spotlight.

Jump’s real entry into a reputation crisis began with the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in 2022. According to disclosures from the U.S. SEC, Jump, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Tai Mo Shan Limited, reached an agreement with Terraform Labs during the first decoupling of UST in May 2021, secretly using over $20 million of its own funds to purchase UST in an attempt to “artificially” stabilize its $1 peg. In exchange, Jump received the right to purchase LUNA at a significant discount. This arrangement greatly enhanced the market’s illusion of UST’s self-repairing ability, misleading the public’s judgment of the effectiveness of its algorithmic mechanism.

The SEC alleges that Jump acted as a statutory underwriter for LUNA tokens from January 2021 to May 2022, illegally distributing securities in the U.S. market without registration. Jump profited nearly $1.3 billion through a strategy of buying low and selling high. Ultimately, by the end of 2024, Jump reached a $123 million settlement with the SEC, revealing part of the mysterious trading giant’s operations in the deep waters of the encryption market.

The crisis did not stop at Terra. In February 2022, the Wormhole protocol, developed by Certus One, a cross-chain bridge developer previously acquired by Jump, was attacked by hackers, resulting in losses of up to $325 million, making it one of the largest security incidents in the encryption industry at the time. To maintain the protocol’s availability and confidence, Jump chose to “dig into its own pockets” to fill the gap, investing $320 million to stabilize the market. Although this move salvaged its short-term reputation, it also severely eroded Jump’s own financial resources.

The collapse of FTX has further exacerbated Jump’s funding black hole. As a former key market maker and strategic partner of FTX and its sister company Alameda Research, Jump not only deeply participated in the liquidity building of its platform but also heavily invested alongside it in the Solana ecosystem, making it one of the largest institutional participants in the Solana ecosystem. However, with the catastrophic collapse of FTX, the price of Solana projects plummeted significantly, leading to an instant dismantling of the ecosystem and further tightening Jump’s balance sheet. According to Michael Lewis’s disclosure in his book “Going Infinite”, Jump lost as much as $206 million in the FTX collapse, and its subsidiary Tai Mo Shan also lost over $75 million, totaling more than $300 million.

Facing multiple blows, increasing regulatory tightening in the US, and the arrival of the encryption winter, Jump Crypto quickly contracted its operations, began layoffs, scaled back its venture capital layout, and strategically withdrew from the US market, gradually fading from the public eye of the encryption community. In the second half of 2024, Jump further sold off a large amount of its holdings in mainstream assets such as ETH, USDC, and USDT, sparking speculation from the outside about its complete withdrawal from the encryption market.

As of March this year, with the gradual clarification of U.S. regulations, this missing “whale” has shown signs of restarting. According to CoinDesk citing insiders, Jump is restoring its U.S. encryption business to full operational status. Although Jump has maintained digital asset trading and market-making activities in other regions of the world, the U.S. encryption trading volume is currently accelerating. Jump is planning to recruit a group of encryption engineers and will start filling positions related to U.S. policy and government liaison in a timely manner.

It is worth noting that, based on public information, Jump has begun to reshape its encryption venture capital landscape this year. From January to date, Jump has participated in the financing of at least six encryption projects, including several infrastructure projects such as Humanity Protocol, Momentum, Securitize, and SOON. This marks Jump’s first large-scale return to public investment in over a year since October 2024, also indicating its determination to strategically transform towards on-chain infrastructure providers.

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