Wormhole execs depart Jump Trading to run protocol independently: Bloomberg
A report from Bloomberg claims that Wormhole’s CEO and COO have left to run Wormhole independently
Yurkoman/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
Jump Trading spun off cross-chain protocol Wormhole as an independent entity, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The report stated that senior staffers at Wormhole left Jump as part of the split, including CEO Saeed Badreg and COO Anthony Ramirez.
Jump Trading did not immediately return a request for comment.
Wormhole, back in 2022, was hacked for roughly $320 million in one of the largest DeFi hacks to date. A whopping 120,000 ETH was stolen at the time. Jump Crypto, the crypto arm of Jump Trading, stepped in to replace the funds.
Earlier this year, in February, Blockworks Research was able to track transactions that showed Jump Crypto recovering the funds stolen by the Wormhole attack.
Read more: Jump Crypto just counter-exploited the Wormhole hacker for $140M
In a statement to Blockworks at the time, Oasis — which helped in recovering the ETH — said that it “received an order from the High Court of England and Wales to take all necessary steps that would result in the retrieval of certain assets involved with the wallet address associated with the Wormhole Exploit on the 2nd February 2022.”
Jump acquired Certus One back in 2021, leading them to also acquire the Wormhole bridge.
Outside of Wormhole, 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.
Parts of the deposition were unsealed, showing that Kariya invoked his right to not incriminate himself roughly eight times in the public parts of the deposition.
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.
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