Jump Trading Spins Off Wormhole as Independent Entity

According to Blockworks, Jump Trading has spun off cross-chain protocol Wormhole as an independent entity. A Bloomberg report revealed that senior staffers at Wormhole, including CEO Saeed Badreg and COO Anthony Ramirez, left Jump as part of the split. Jump Trading did not immediately return a request for comment. In 2022, Wormhole was hacked for approximately $320 million, making it one of the largest DeFi hacks to date. At the time, 120,000 ETH was stolen. Jump Crypto, the crypto arm of Jump Trading, stepped in to replace the funds. In February this year, Blockworks Research tracked transactions that showed Jump Crypto recovering the funds stolen by the Wormhole attack. Oasis, which helped in recovering the ETH, stated that it received an order from the High Court of England and Wales to take all necessary steps to retrieve certain assets involved with the wallet address associated with the Wormhole Exploit on February 2nd, 2022. Jump acquired Certus One in 2021, leading them to also acquire the Wormhole bridge. Jump Crypto has faced scrutiny for alleged backdoor deals, with Jump Crypto president Kanav Kariya pleading the fifth during a deposition by the Securities and Exchange Commission in its lawsuit against Terraform Labs and its former CEO Do Kwon. A class-action lawsuit filed in May alleged that Jump earned around $1.3 billion from manipulating Terra. The claims, however, have not been proven. The SEC’s original complaint cited an unnamed US trading firm to manipulate UST’s price, which the class-action suit speculated is Jump Trading.