From Flash Trading Innovation to Crypto Market Turbulence: How Jump Trading's Paul Gurinas-Founded Firm Became Central to Industry Collapse

Jump Trading, the Chicago-based financial firm founded by Paul Gurinas and Bill DiSomma in 2001, rose to prominence during the high-frequency trading boom of the early 2000s. Yet few outside Wall Street knew that by 2023, this secretive trading powerhouse had become entangled in one of cryptocurrency’s most catastrophic events. As investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) intensified, the company that once seemed poised to dominate digital assets found itself retreating from the market it once believed it could control.

Fortune’s investigation into Jump’s cryptocurrency operations—based on interviews with more than two dozen former employees, competitors, and industry traders—reveals how a traditional finance giant attempted to apply its algorithmic trading strategies to an unregulated frontier, ultimately accelerating one of the industry’s worst collapses while making substantial profits along the way.

The Chicago Trading House That Bet Big on Crypto

When Jump Trading was founded in 2001, the firm emerged from an earlier company called Akamai, established in 1999. Paul Gurinas, along with co-founder Bill DiSomma, both cut their teeth at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), where they watched the floor-based trading model give way to electronic systems. At the CME, traders would literally jump and shout to signal bids—the origin of the company’s name.

By the early 2000s, high-frequency trading had become a lucrative frontier. Jump positioned itself at the forefront of this revolution, developing proprietary algorithms that could execute trades faster than competitors, spotting market inefficiencies that lasted mere microseconds. Like peers such as Jane Street and Citadel Securities, Jump guarded its strategies with paranoid intensity. The firm required nondisclosure agreements even for community event sponsorship inquiries at its headquarters in the historic Montgomery Ward Building on the Chicago River.

This culture of absolute secrecy defined Jump’s early decades. When cryptocurrency emerged in the mid-2010s, the company initially viewed it as a testing ground—a “toy market” where traders could experiment with new strategies without risking core capital or threatening the firm’s stock and bond operations.

Paul Gurinas and Bill DiSomma: Building an Algorithmic Trading Empire

Paul Gurinas and Bill DiSomma both studied at the University of Illinois before beginning their careers at the CME. Their shared background shaped Jump’s recruiting philosophy: the firm rarely posted job listings or participated in traditional campus recruitment. Instead, Jump sought talent through private referrals and personal networks, often identifying promising interns from the university where both founders had studied.

DiSomma, in particular, harbored genuine interest in cryptocurrency’s decentralization vision. As someone who had witnessed the transition from CME’s crowded trading floors to internet-based systems, DiSomma recognized that blockchain technology represented another potential paradigm shift. Yet despite this philosophical interest, Jump’s involvement in crypto remained constrained and compartmentalized. The cryptocurrency division operated with minimal oversight, functioning almost as a separate entity within the larger firm—isolated enough that losses in digital assets would not threaten Jump’s core trading operations.

According to former employees, this segregation was intentional. Cryptocurrency offered advantages that traditional markets could not: its own exchanges, tradable assets, and distinct market characteristics made it perfect for training new talent without exposing the company to systemic risk. Young traders and developers joined Jump’s crypto team with extraordinary freedom compared to their counterparts in traditional finance divisions.

A Fresh Recruit Enters the Digital Asset Frontier

In January 2017, a 20-year-old Kanav Kariya joined Jump as an intern through a friend’s referral. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, in a middle-class family, Kariya had moved to the United States to study computer science at the University of Illinois after falling in love with American infrastructure and education quality during a childhood visit to Disneyland at age 13.

Unlike many future Jump colleagues who learned programming as children, Kariya had discovered coding during his undergraduate years. His childhood passion for video games and war films had primed him for the kind of strategic thinking required in algorithmic trading. Within Jump, Kariya was tasked with building early cryptocurrency trading infrastructure with minimal management constraints. As he later recalled in a 2023 podcast: “We were free to do our own thing… It was like working in a completely closed bubble.”

The bubble expanded rapidly. In 2017, Bitcoin surged from less than $1,000 in January to nearly $20,000 by December. Jump’s cryptocurrency team, once dismissed as a playground for interns, suddenly became one of the firm’s best-performing divisions. When the Bitcoin boom inevitably collapsed in 2018, Kariya had already graduated and joined Jump full-time. His trajectory from intern to core contributor had begun.

Market Making Without Guardrails: The Crypto Industry’s Unregulated Model

Traditional high-frequency trading firms like Jump operate primarily as market makers—providing liquidity by standing ready to buy and sell securities, profiting from the bid-ask spread on each transaction. In traditional finance, market makers operate under strict regulatory oversight. They work with exchanges supervised by regulators, not directly with companies. Physical separation between divisions prevents conflicts of interest between market making and venture capital operations.

The cryptocurrency industry inverted this model entirely. As Michael Selig, an attorney at the digital asset-focused law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, observed: “In the cryptocurrency field, you will not be subject to that kind of direct regulation.”

Crypto market makers sign agreements directly with projects, often assisting with exchange listings and driving trading volume through liquidity provision. Projects compensate market makers by lending them large token quantities to facilitate trading. Critically, market makers also negotiate for options—rights to purchase substantial token quantities at significant discounts if the project succeeds.

For firms like Jump, this structure created extraordinary profit potential. While spreads from trading remained important, the real money came from options. A market maker could simultaneously profit from spreads while holding deeply discounted call options on a project’s token—essentially betting on success through two separate channels. As one anonymous crypto exchange founder explained: “If you work at Jump, you get to decide which tokens will succeed.”

Jump’s venture capital arm, Jump Capital, further complicated incentives. Although ostensibly independent, after Jump Capital was integrated into Jump Crypto in 2021, business conversations between the venture and trading teams became increasingly interlinked. For a traditional finance firm, this arrangement would be considered intolerable market manipulation. Yet in crypto, it became standard practice.

Jump’s negotiating posture was notably aggressive. While other market makers might request one or two percentage points of total token supply, Jump typically demanded five percentage points or more. “It gives them a lot of ammunition to sabotage,” said one founder who negotiated with Jump in 2021. Despite the harsh terms, most projects accepted. Rejecting Jump meant missing out on the market-making support necessary for token success.

The Face of a Secret Powerhouse

By 2021, Kanav Kariya had become Jump Crypto’s public representative. Now 25 years old, Kariya possessed qualities rare in traditional finance: genuine intellectual charisma combined with approachable humility. While Bill DiSomma and other Jump executives shunned the spotlight, Kariya appeared on podcasts, spoke at conferences, and granted media interviews. His slight Bombay accent, thoughtful demeanor, and modest refusal to make price predictions endeared him to crypto communities.

Internally, Kariya had grown responsible for building Jump’s trading systems while expanding the Crypto team to over 150 employees. Jump Capital, meanwhile, backed star projects including Solana. In September 2021, two months before Bitcoin reached $69,000, Jump formally established Jump Crypto as an independent division with Kariya as president.

Jump invested in cultivating Kariya’s public image. The company hired Nathan Roth, former chief marketing officer of the dating app Hinge, as Jump Crypto’s CMO. Internally, Jump viewed Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a model, seeking to position Kariya as a “blockchain philosopher” figure similar to a16z partner Chris Dixon. Court documents revealed that Kariya’s deputies coordinated with Terraform Labs’ public relations team to amplify his media exposure.

Yet behind the scenes, according to whistleblower James Hunsaker, Bill DiSomma retained primary control. Hunsaker later testified to the SEC: “He (Bill DiSomma) is leading that team, and Kariya is very much the public face of Jump Crypto.”

The Terra Connection: When Intervention Became Manipulation

Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon represented Jump Crypto’s crown jewel. While Jump never directly invested in Terraform as a traditional equity holder, it served as the project’s primary market maker. Through private Signal messages, Kariya and Kwon developed a relationship tinged with admiration and camaraderie. Kwon, only a few years Kariya’s senior, had become a cryptocurrency celebrity rivaling Sam Bankman-Fried in prominence.

Kwon’s vision for Terra centered on algorithmic stablecoins—a complex mechanism attempting to maintain UST’s $1 peg through interactions with LUNA tokens and complex formulas. By May 2021, UST had begun losing its peg. During a crisis Zoom meeting that month, Kariya proposed a solution: Jump would secretly purchase enormous quantities of UST to artificially restore confidence while Kwon granted Jump up to 65 million LUNA options at $0.40, despite LUNA trading above $90 on secondary markets.

Court documents revealed that Jump later earned approximately $1 billion from this single arrangement. The operation temporarily restored UST’s peg, allowing Kwon to claim “natural recovery” on Twitter. A Terraform employee privately admitted in a text: “If Jump hadn’t intervened, we might really be finished.”

Yet this intervention represented market manipulation more than genuine rescue. When UST finally collapsed in May 2022, the implosion was catastrophic. $40 billion evaporated in days. Investors lost life savings. Crypto communities filled with suicide threats and compensation pleas. The cascade eventually triggered FTX’s collapse and prompted regulators to intensify cryptocurrency oversight.

Jump’s role remained hidden until 2023, when the SEC filed fraud charges against Terraform Labs and Do Kwon based partly on whistleblower testimony from James Hunsaker, one of Kariya’s senior deputies. Terraform and Kwon settled for $4.5 billion in June, though bankruptcy filings may prevent full payment. Kwon, facing DOJ criminal charges and extradition proceedings from Montenegro, denied wrongdoing. Terraform declined comment.

Jump faced no criminal charges. Yet the company’s reputation suffered irreparably as trade secrets spilled into federal court testimony. The March 2024 release of whistleblower testimony marked a watershed moment in Jump’s cryptocurrency trajectory.

The Fallout and Departure: A Company in Retreat

By mid-2023, Jump’s dominance in cryptocurrency had visibly eroded. The company that once aggressively pursued market-making opportunities had largely withdrawn from the sector. Competitors including Jane Street entered the Bitcoin spot ETF market when it officially launched in January 2024—Jump notably declined participation. The company divested flagship projects including Wormhole, its internally incubated cross-chain bridge that had suffered a $325 million hack in February 2022 (though Jump covered losses and the funds were recovered in 2023).

When Wormhole launched in April 2024, trading volume exceeded $1 billion—yet significantly, the project declined to hire Jump, its former parent company, as market maker. This symbolic rejection underscored Jump’s changing status. The company had also reportedly lost over $1 billion in Terra’s final collapse and held nearly $300 million trapped on FTX when that exchange collapsed.

Regulatory clouds continued gathering. The CFTC investigation into Jump’s cryptocurrency operations progressed in parallel with DOJ charges against Do Kwon. Bloomberg reported that prosecutors reviewed May 2022 communications between Jump and Jane Street employees discussing a potential UST bailout that never materialized. Both firms declined comment at the time.

When Kanav Kariya appeared before the SEC for 2021 deposition hearings, his appearance had transformed dramatically. The youthful prodigy now looked exhausted, older than his years, visibly shaken by the mounting legal exposure.

On June 24, 2023, days after the CFTC investigation broke publicly, the 28-year-old who had risen from intern to president announced his departure. “Today marks the end of a personal journey for me. It’s my last day at Jump,” Kariya posted on X.

People close to Kariya indicated that both parties had planned his exit for months. Though Kariya claimed he would continue “participating” in Jump’s portfolio companies, his future in cryptocurrency appeared uncertain at best.

Reflections on an Overconfident Gamble

Jump Trading’s arc in cryptocurrency exemplifies a recurring pattern: a dominant traditional finance firm enters an emerging, underregulated market confident in its technical superiority, only to discover that algorithmic advantage and mathematical sophistication cannot substitute for institutional integrity or regulatory alignment.

The firm attempted to be everything simultaneously—a Chicago-style high-frequency trading operation, a development studio, and a venture capital firm. Yet as one Jump competitor observed: “They’re still too much like a trading company… Their teeth are too sharp.”

Despite massive losses—likely exceeding $1 billion when accounting for Terra, Wormhole, FTX exposure, and regulatory penalties—Jump probably profited overall from its cryptocurrency ventures. The $1 billion earned from the Terra options alone vastly exceeded most losses. Yet for a high-frequency trading firm whose business model depends on perpetually pursuing the next profitable trade, Jump has surrendered enormous future opportunities by retreating from the market it once dominated.

The firm founded by Paul Gurinas and Bill DiSomma built its reputation on unmatched speed, technological sophistication, and strategic foresight in traditional markets. Cryptocurrency promised similar dominance. Instead, Jump discovered that markets governed by different rules—or no rules at all—operate according to fundamentally different principles.

James Hunsaker, the whistleblower who exposed Jump’s Terra involvement, left the company in February 2022 and co-founded Monad with a former colleague. Their project completed a $225 million financing in April 2024 at a $3 billion valuation—notably without Jump’s participation. Even in cryptocurrency’s venture landscape, the firm that once shaped which tokens would succeed finds itself increasingly excluded from projects it might have once dominated.