Author: Maher, Foresight News

In May this year, a Jane Street 13F position report caused the crypto market to explode instantly.

The most mysterious quantitative giant on Wall Street suddenly reduced its holdings in BlackRock’s Bitcoin spot ETF IBIT by 71% from 20.31 million shares ($790 million) to about 5.9 million shares ($225 million). Its FBTC holdings also fell by 60% simultaneously, and its Strategy holdings were directly cut by about 78%. At the same time, it was quietly increasing its holdings in Ethereum ETFs to a total of approximately $82 million.

A month ago, this company that “has no CEO and relies on mathematical models and extremely low latency” had just handed over a single-quarter transaction revenue of US$16.1 billion and a net profit of US$10.3 billion. The per-employee salary was US$2.68 million, nearly 7 times that of Goldman Sachs. What is the concept in the currency circle? In 2024, Tether, the most profitable company in the currency circle, will have a net profit of only US$13 billion. Hyperliquid’s per capita revenue is US$78 million, ranking first in the world, and its revenue in 2025 is only US$908 million.

What is it planning in the encryption market? The answer lies in the systematic layout of the past few years.

The mysterious player on Wall Street, the top trader behind the scenes in the currency circle

Founded in 2000, Jane Street never manages client assets, instead using only its own funds to trade on more than 200 exchanges around the world. It has no CEO, no traditional hierarchy. Each trading desk and business unit is run by one of the equity holders, but no one person has final say. Co-founder Rob Granieri (also one of the defendants in Luna's lawsuit) is considered internally the "top of his generation," but major decisions are made by a broader group of collective leaders.

Rob is the only one of the company's four co-founders who is still in office. Interestingly, it was Rob who personally recruited SBF. SBF later left to found Alameda Research and FTX.

Jane Street Co-Founder Robert Granieri

The 13F document just now is just the tip of the iceberg. In the past five years, it has already become the invisible operating system of the crypto market liquidity infrastructure through AP seats in spot ETFs, the 10-minute front-running before Luna’s collapse, suspected anonymous arbitrage addresses in on-chain prediction markets, and equity casting nets across exchanges and DeFi protocols.

In 2017, Jane Street officially entered the crypto market, with 22-year veteran Thomas Uhm leading initial business development. In 2018, it launched the institutional-grade OTC trading platform JCX, which supports 7×24-hour mainstream token trading and began to provide stable liquidity for institutional counterparties.

In May 2022, Terraform Labs quietly withdrew $150 million in UST from the Curve 3pool. Ten minutes later, a wallet associated with Jane Street withdrew 85 million UST from the same pool, triggering a death spiral with a market value of $40 billion.

In January 2024, a Bitcoin spot ETF was approved. Jane Street becomes a core authorized participant (AP) of BlackRock IBIT, Fidelity FBIT and WisdomTree ETFs. This means that every retail investor’s ETF subscription has its participation behind it.

In December 2025, an address signed "JaneStreetIndia" appeared in Polymarket's "15-minute Bitcoin Price Guess" market. The address used a two-way betting arbitrage strategy (buying both upside and downside, locking in risk-free profits) and made nearly $360,000 in 25 days.

In terms of crypto infrastructure, Jane Street’s imprint is all over crypto infrastructure: Kraken, 1inch (Series B $175 million), Arbitrum, ZetaChain, Euler FinanceKaito, etc. It also holds equity interests in mining stocks such as Hut 8, Bitfarms, Cipher Mining, etc. in the secondary market.

Its core logic is to use early front-running, capital arbitrage, dimensionality reduction and other methods to deeply embed the liquidity infrastructure layer of the encryption market, and steadily extract "tolls" and information asymmetry profits from it.

The birth of Bitcoin spot ETF is the moment when Jane Street comes to the fore.

Bitcoin spot ETF’s largest “channel provider”

In January 2024, the U.S. SEC approved multiple Bitcoin spot ETFs. After the ETF was approved, institutional funds poured in much faster than expected. According to SoSoValue data, as of June 16, its total cumulative net inflow was $53.49 billion, and its data inflow and outflow indicators have had a significant impact on BTC prices.

In the pipeline layer of this tens of billions floodgate, Jane Street is the only name that appears in almost all BTC ETF prospectuses - from BlackRock IBIT, Fidelity FBTC to WisdomTree, it is either a core authorized participant (AP) or even the only AP.

Retail investors who buy IBIT on Robinhood can only buy and sell at market prices, but APs like Jane Street can directly knock on the back door of BlackRock and exchange a basket of Bitcoin spot with the fund company for ETF shares. They can also return the ETF shares in exchange for Bitcoin. This is commonly referred to as "creation" and "redemption."

This "wholesale right" gives AP an arbitrage space that is beyond the reach of retail investors: when the market price of IBIT is higher than the net value (premium) of its underlying Bitcoin, AP buys spot Bitcoin → creates ETF shares → sells ETFs in the market to earn the price difference; when IBIT is discounted, the operation is reversed. As long as the ETF price deviates from the spot price, AP can take a risk-free arbitrage.

What’s special about Jane Street is that it’s not just an AP, it’s also a market maker. While it is exchanging shares with BlackRock at the "wholesale level", it is also providing buying and selling quotes to retail investors at the "retail level", eating the price difference at both ends. When the Bitcoin spot ETF was approved in January 2024, all 11 applicants listed it as AP in the prospectus - Valkyrie even only selected 2 APs, one of which was Jane Street.

In the 13F filing for Q4 2025, Jane Street held approximately 20.31 million shares of IBIT, with a market capitalization of approximately $790 million. In Q1 of 2026, the holdings were significantly reduced by 71% (IBIT dropped to about 5.9 million shares, worth about US$225 million; in Q1 of 2026, the holdings dropped another 71% to 5.9 million shares. In just three quarters, IBIT positions fluctuated like a roller coaster. Interestingly, in Q1 they added about US$82 million to the ETH ETF.

It should be noted that this is not the position curve of "long-term value investment". This is the inventory fluctuation of high-frequency market makers - positions swing back and forth with arbitrage opportunities. When opportunities come, they are filled up and withdrawn when the premium converges. This is how they make money.

Former hedge fund manager Michael Green commented on this: "I am disturbed to see someone interpret Jane Street's 13F as a bullish signal. These positions are almost certainly hedged by undisclosed options and futures. They are not building a position in Bitcoin, this is standard market making.

In addition, in addition to Bitcoin and Ethereum, it was also revealed that the market maker of SOL ETF is Jane Street.

Compared to other market makers, Jane Street is particularly strong in complex/non-mainstream ETFs such as fixed income, international equities, commodities and crypto ETFs. Combines quantitative techniques and fundamental/correlation analysis. They will translate ETF demand into correlation signals and hedging strategies, willing to hold positions longer to achieve structural arbitrage.

In contrast: Citadel and Jump Trading prefer ultra-low latency pure technology and high frequency, and speed is their core competitiveness. Jane Street isn't the fastest, but its risk management system and balance sheet allow it to hold positions longer amid volatility, earning the spread that others can't hold for the long term.

When it serves as an authorized participant of IBIT, FBTC and multiple Ethereum ETFs at the same time, what it collects is not the return of directional bets, but the "toll" generated by the entire crypto institutionalization process - every subscription, every redemption, every arbitrage balance is completed through Jane Street's pipeline.

However, the experience of this model in the Indian market has become a negative example.

In July 2025, the Securities Regulatory Commission of India, SEBI, issued a temporary ban on entities related to Jane Street on the grounds of market manipulation and froze approximately 48.4 billion rupees (approximately US$566 million) in assets. SEBI's 105-page ruling accuses Jane Street of systematically manipulating the Bank Nifty Index in India on 18 derivatives expiry dates between January 2023 and March 2025, using a routine of "pulling up index constituents in the early trading, simultaneously establishing large-scale option short positions, and then hitting the market in reverse at midday to cash in option profits." While recording a loss of approximately US$7.5 million in the spot market, Jane Street earned approximately US$8,900 from the derivatives side. Thousands of dollars.

This compliance beast is secretly carrying a knife, and the inside story has made it fall into quite a bit of controversy.

In the critical 10 minutes, Luna collapsed "Ignition Man"

On February 23, 2026, Terraform Labs bankruptcy administrator Todd Snyder filed an 83-page indictment in the federal court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants include Jane Street Group LLC, Jane Street Capital LLC, co-founder Robert Granieri, and two employees Bryce Pratt and Michael Huang.

The core of the accusation is that before Terra collapsed in May 2022, Jane Street learned of the liquidity crisis in advance through an internal information channel, completed a precise withdrawal of $85 million in UST within 10 minutes, thereby avoiding a loss of more than $200 million, and tried to buy Luna at a deep discount after the collapse.

Bryce Pratt joined Jane Street after interning at Terraform Labs. He established a private group chat called "Bryce's Secret" to connect Terraform's internal engineers with the Jane Street trading desk. Through this channel, Jane Street knew the specific time and amount of divestment from Curve 3pool before Terraform publicly announced it. For a quantitative trading company, this "time difference" is the arbitrage space.

At 17:44 on May 8, 2022, Terraform Labs withdrew $150 million in UST from Curve 3pool. This operation was not publicly announced at the time (transaction hash 0x18bd477f9beeff22b2ad0c6d48a9c0f02b542049789f0638f5ec50365f1d1de7).

Thirteen minutes later, — a wallet identified by the complaint as associated with Jane Street performed a swap of 85 million UST from the same pool (transaction hash 0xaa23df48c53f221d0e8ac60ffc9e69340f3e8948fcdc936f3aee9c887d802abb). This is one of the largest single redemptions ever on the Curve platform.

The logic of the indictment is: If Jane Street had not been informed of Terraform's plan in advance, it would have been impossible for it to make such a precise and huge reverse operation within 10 minutes after Terraform had just completed a large divestment. Normal quant models require response time, but this wallet’s response time is only 10 minutes.

More importantly, after Terraform divested, 3pool's liquidity has been significantly weakened. Taking away another 85 million at this time is equivalent to another kick on the shaking table, directly shattering market confidence and triggering the de-anchoring of UST.

By exiting early, Jane Street avoided significant depreciation in the death spiral of its UST and Luna-related positions. The indictment gives a specific figure: more than $200 million. The plaintiffs raised a total of 13 legal claims, covering insider trading, securities fraud, violations of the Commodity Exchange Act, unjust enrichment and breach of confidentiality obligations, demanding compensation for losses and the recovery of all illegal gains.

On April 23, 2026, Jane Street filed a 39-page motion to dismiss with three core defenses:

• Terraform itself committed a multi-billion dollar fraud, and the bankrupt party cannot pass the disaster on to others;

• Terraform’s on-chain operations themselves are publicly visible, and the 10-minute window does not constitute non-public information;

• Its largest single deal occurred after Terraform divested, not before. A company spokesman called this "desperate lawsuit and baseless extortion."

The 2022 crash, regarded by countless people as a "crypto black swan", is gradually showing another face after legal excavations afterwards: while retail investors are scrambling to escape, the institutions closest to the core information may have already stood at the exit.

The prediction market does not predict the rise or fall, but only charges time tax

If the above three dimensions are Jane Street’s clear-cut layout in the crypto world, then its potential impact on the on-chain prediction market constitutes an implicit dimension that is harder to quantify but increasingly deserves attention.

When traditional quantitative giants extend their tentacles to the native market on the chain, a dimensionality reduction attack occurs. And Polymarket—a prediction market platform that processed more than $9 billion in trading volume in 2024 and topped $13 billion in 2025—has become the latest prey.

Ironically, traders at Jane Street, which was heavily fined and kicked out of the market by the Securities Regulatory Commission of India in 2025, seemed to quickly find a new outlet in the crypto-anarchy prediction market.

In December 2025, a Polymarket address signed by JaneStreetIndia appeared in Polymarket’s 15-minute Bitcoin guessing market.

According to on-chain statistical analysis, this account is an ultra-high-frequency trading robot. Its operating logic is completely out of the "prediction" category of ordinary players, but pure mathematics and delay arbitrage.

This account focuses on event contracts: It hardly touches those long-term political elections or cultural events, and is 100% focused on "15-minute cryptocurrency price rise and fall)" this extremely high-frequency, high-volatility market with extremely fast results.

Transaction frequency and winning rate: According to recent on-chain statistics, the account made more than 11,000 transactions within the first two months of being online. What’s even more terrifying is that its winning rate remains above 95% all year round. In the first 25 days of data exposed, it achieved profits on 23 out of 25 days.

According to on-chain statistics, the address earned US$360,000 in the first 25 days. After two months of operation, the total profit quickly soared to approximately US$645,000.

This style of play is in stark contrast to the reckless early days of individual traders on Polymarket. In early 2024, anonymous developer @defiance_cr used a principal of US$10,000 to run a market-making robot on Polymarket, making a daily profit of US$700 to US$800, with an annualized return of approximately 2,700%. But by early 2026, he chose to open source the code and quit, arguing that it was no longer profitable under current market conditions - because institutional competitors had entered the market.

First of all, it is necessary to state: As of now, no blockchain analysis platform has officially labeled this address, and Jane Street has never publicly admitted that it is related to this address. All correlations are speculation based on on-chain behavior. But the following speculation has a high probability of pointing to Jane Street.

This address harvests the deviation between the contract price and the settlement price by buying both rising and falling prices at the same time. In essence, it is a transplantation of the same set of convergence arbitrage logic into different markets as spot ETFs.

This address executed over 11,000 transactions with a win rate of nearly 100%. It is impossible for human traders to maintain this discipline for 25 days; the only ones that can continue to harvest in this squeezed environment are systems with institutional-grade computing power and low-latency infrastructure.

In addition, changing from an institutional logo to a completely meaningless number string, if it is a retail investor impersonation, will usually be shown off or discarded after being noticed; but choosing the most covert name change path to continue the operation is more in line with the typical operation manual of the institutional compliance department: no excuses, only concealment.

Jane Street's core competency is extreme low latency (FPGA hardware, microwave networks, fiber optic infrastructure). The 15-minute market cycle is extremely short and requires extremely high latency - while retail investors are still refreshing the page, the robot has already completed order placement, hedging, and settlement. The address's choice of short 15-minute periods rather than long-term forecasts suggests its strength is speed rather than judgment, which is very much in line with Jane Street's DNA.

Then why is it unlikely to be other quantitative institutions? What about Jump Trading or other institutions?

In February this year, Bloomberg reported that Jump Trading had acquired shares of Polymarket and Kalshi through equity cooperation and established a prediction market trading team of about 20 people; DRW recruited prediction market traders with a basic salary of US$200,000; SIG became Kalshi’s first official market maker. The entry methods of these "regular troops" are compliance, equity, and team-based.

The entry method of Jane Street is anonymization, robotization, and zero-sum game. It does not seek platform cooperation, but appears directly in the form of an on-chain address and uses the most brutal arbitrage strategy to harvest. This wild approach is closer to Jane Street’s acting style in the Luna incident (information in advance, low-key execution, denial afterward).

For Jane Street, Polymarket is not an experimental field where one needs to believe in the "ideal of decentralized prediction markets", but a brand new, illiquid, pricing biased volatility surface - and then harvested.

What is revealed here is a deeper structural problem: when an institution has the pricing power of the spot market, the ability to participate in the derivatives market, and the potential liquidity influence of the forecast market, the closed loop of information and funds formed between the three-tier markets can theoretically achieve highly coordinated gains.

Even if all operations are within the legal framework, the information asymmetry brought about by this multi-layer penetration is enough to put ordinary retail investors' trading decisions at a great disadvantage.

This is not a conspiracy theory, but the reality of the structure of financial markets.

Conclusion

Jane Street is not an institution investing in crypto. It does not bet on the rise or fall of Bitcoin, does not care which public chain wins, or even whether the ideal of decentralization is realized.

Looking back on its multiple layouts, what it earns from the hundreds of billions gate of Bitcoin spot ETF is not the return of Bitcoin appreciation, but the "toll" of the basis difference between the ETF share and the spot net value. During the 10-minute window when Luna crashed, it learned the coordinates of the crash in advance to avoid major losses. At the infrastructure level, it casts a wide net on Kraken, 1inch, Arbitrum and Bitcoin mining stocks - it does not bet on who will win, but only ensures that no matter who wins, it can control the say in infrastructure. In Polymarket’s 15 Minute Bullet Market, it turns prediction markets into another volatility harvester.

Traders never stand in front of the stage. When traders become the infrastructure itself, the market no longer needs traders.

It has become a market.

When the top regular troops of traditional Wall Street penetrate into DeFi, OTC, and even prediction markets on native chains such as Polymarket, is the "permissionless, retail-friendly" alpha space that the crypto world is proud of being permanently erased? When the so-called genius self-employed people have to open source code and quit the game, has the encryption industry become more mature, or has it completely become a new pool of flesh and blood on Wall Street?

Perhaps there is no universal answer.