Builders Here

While most still view Jump Crypto as one of the largest trading participants, which will always be core to our DNA, we view ourselves as serious builders who identify constraints through our trading and experience interacting with protocols and then build to solve those constraints. At Jump Crypto, we do not sit in an ivory tower pontificating on ten-year visions of the future; we start by identifying hard problems and building. Our history has shown us that building begets more building:

• Pyth Network: Traditional market data oracles were too slow and opaque in their data sources/quality for the needs of high-performance traders and DeFi applications. So, we worked as core contributors to Pyth, a high-performance open-source oracle with first party data for crypto, equities, FX, and commodities from major exchanges and trading firms. Pyth now has over 100 data publishers, supports 100+ blockchains, 520+ applications, with 280 million+ updates a day. The identification of a critical gap, combined with engineering and consortium-building has made Pyth one of the most successful open-source decentralized oracles.
• Wormhole: As Pyth was being built it was quickly realized that its data could not be siloed to one blockchain in an increasingly multichain world. This led to Wormhole, a decentralized open-source protocol that enables transfers of messages cross-chain, allowing for a variety of functions including the facilitation of assets across different blockchains through applications built on top of Wormhole. Over 1 billion messages have been sent and Wormhole continues to expand, onboarding some of the largest traditional finance institutions through its partnership with Securitize and Centrifuge for Wormhole powered tokenization.
• Firedancer: The idea to build a second, independent, high performance validator client for Solana traces back to Jump Crypto’s starting to trade on Solana DeFi in 2020. Jump’s experience interacting on chain showed that even a blockchain that is highly performant relative to its peers needed to be scaled if it is to approach the “North Star” of Decentralized Nasdaq.
• DoubleZero: While building Firedancer, engineers realized that it is not enough to “simply” write a new high performance validator client drawing on experience in low latency systems but that the public internet itself is “too slow” and a constraint in and of itself. The identification of this constraint, that the public internet is not designed for and cannot support the speed and reliability that 24/7 exchanges, led to the creation of DoubleZero with Austin Federa and Malbec Labs. DoubleZero, is building an open source, decentralized global fiber-optic network made up of a diverse set of contributors to be base layer infrastructure for distributed systems.
• Critical Security Infrastructure: Constraints identified at Jump have also led to the creation of internal tools and teams that are now independent companies.
  • Unable to find a truly self-hosted private-key and policy management system on the market, Jump Crypto built an in-house self-custody and wallet-operations platform for managing the thousands of on-chain transfers required to support its trading business. The team behind this effort is now its own company, Cordial Systems, which offers a robust, self-hosted digital asset wallet stack deployed by Jump and multiple centralized exchanges.
  • What is now Asymmetric Research spun out of an internal team of world-class security researchers and engineers dedicated to securing Jump Crypto and its builds. A lesson learned from high profile-exploits is that point-in-time security audits are insufficient and that continuous, embedded, support is needed throughout the entire development cycle. Formed to embed directly in the build process and secure smart contracts, custody management, and on-chain infrastructure, the team now delivers this expertise across the industry. Asymmetric Research’s work has helped projects avoid more than $5 billion in potential losses through its research discoveries and disclosures, and it has supported over 100 security incidents. Asymmetric Research continues to support Jump Crypto while also serving as a key core contributor to others.