Author: A Fish CoolFish
A company with 3,000 employees earns more than Citigroup and Bank of America. It does not advertise, has no CEO, and does not sign non-compete agreements. Its name rarely appears in the news until it shows up in court.
On February 24, the liquidators of Terraform sued Todd Snyder and high-frequency trading giant Jane Street, accusing it of trading on insider information to profit illegally and ultimately accelerating the collapse of Do Kwon's cryptocurrency empire.
Although Jane Street denied the allegations, claiming they are unfounded, the market’s attention has begun to turn toward this company. At the same time, a tweet emerged featuring a recruitment notice for Jane Street interns.
The screenshot shows that the company is hiring quantitative trading interns for a four-month contract with a base salary of $300,000. The key point is that it does not require a financial background or programming experience, only asks one question: Can you solve problems?
Seeing the salary and requirements at first glance is indeed surprising. Who exactly is this company? Is the salary for quantitative interns really that high? What does it rely on to earn so much money? What role does it play in global financial markets?
These questions deserve serious answers.
Because when you peel away the layers of low profile and truly understand this company, you will realize one thing: the existence of Jane Street itself is an extreme experiment about information, speed, and the boundaries of rules.
Its name rarely appears in the news until it shows up in court.
A windowless little room and four gamblers
In 1999, New York.
Three traders who left Susquehanna International Group (SIG), along with a programmer who jumped ship from IBM, rented a windowless small office and started a business most people disdain: ADR arbitrage.
ADR, American Depositary Receipt, is a certificate for foreign company stocks traded in the U.S. market. The price should theoretically align with the original shares listed in their home country, but time zone differences, exchange rate fluctuations, and information delays can create small gaps between the two. The four founders of Jane Street—Tim Reynolds, Robert Granieri, Michael Jenkins, and Marc Gerstein—focused on these gaps, exchanging algorithms and speed for profit.
This business has almost no color: it lacks a great narrative, it has no ambition to disrupt the industry, only an extreme sensitivity to numbers and a pathological pursuit of execution.
According to research by Alphacution, the company was possibly registered initially under the name "Henry Capital," and in August 2000, it was renamed Jane Street. Externally, they are low-key to the point of paranoia.
This paranoia seems to have been part of the company's DNA from the very beginning.
Among the four founders, three came from the same company and left to start their own business. Susquehanna even once sued Jane Street for "stealing proprietary information and poaching core talent"—though the lawsuit ultimately went nowhere. This sensitivity may have profoundly influenced Jane Street's subsequent approach to its own strategic secrets: no media interviews, no industry conference speeches, no unnecessary exposure.
They quietly worked on problems in that windowless little room.
ETFs: The bet that changed everything
Entering the early 21st century, Jane Street made a decision that would prove to change everything: to focus its primary efforts on ETFs, which were then still a niche product.
ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds) were relatively marginal products in the early 2000s. They had low liquidity, few participants, and large institutions felt it was inconvenient to enter or exit, basically steering clear. Yet, it was this "neglect" that turned it into the ideal hunting ground for Jane Street.
Market making is at the core logic of this game. Market makers simultaneously quote buy (bid) and sell (ask) prices, ready to transact with any counterpart and earn profits from the bid-ask spread. It sounds simple, but requires accurately pricing assets at millisecond speeds, managing vast inventory risks, and maintaining continuous operations across global markets.
Jane Street achieved this with algorithms, doing it quickly and accurately.
What happened next became one of the classic "choosing the right track" stories in history.
Over the next twenty years, ETFs experienced explosive growth. From several hundred billion dollars to tens of trillions, institutions, retail investors, and pension funds flocked in. Jane Street became one of the most indispensable infrastructures in this market.
3,000 people took down Citigroup and Bank of America
There’s a set of numbers that can give you an intuitive sense of Jane Street’s earning ability.
In 2024, Jane Street’s net trading income: $20.5 billion.
In the same year, Citigroup's trading division net income: $19.8 billion. Bank of America’s trading division: $18.8 billion.
Jane Street won, with a margin of $700 million over Citigroup and $1.7 billion over Bank of America.
According to online data, Citigroup has approximately 220,000 global employees. Bank of America has about 210,000 global employees, while Jane Street has over 3,000 employees.
This is an almost perverse efficiency.
Source: MSTIMES
And by 2025, the data is even more astonishing; reports from Bloomberg and others indicate that Jane Street's net trading income in Q2 of 2025 will be $10.1 billion surpassing all major Wall Street firms, with total revenue of $24 billion in the first three quarters of 2025 exceeding the entire amount for 2024...
When comparing these figures against industry standards: Citadel Securities will have trading revenues of around $9.7 billion in 2024, Virtu Financial around $2.9 billion, Flow Traders around $500 million. The gap between Jane Street and its competitors is at least twofold.
Apart from scale figures, there are also market share data that can help you understand how deeply this company penetrates:
In 2024, Jane Street accounted for 24% of the primary U.S. ETF market share, 41% of bond ETF trading volume, and 17% of the secondary ETF market in Europe. The average monthly stock trading volume reaches $2 trillion, comprising approximately 8% of all trading volume in the U.S. options market, and over 10% in North American equity trading.
In other words: You, your fund, your pension, every time you buy or sell an ETF, there's a significant probability that your counterparty is Jane Street. And you might not even know of its existence.
OCaml, puzzles, and that real war machine
Jane Street's headquarters is located at 250 Vesey Street, Manhattan's financial district. Inside the office sits a genuine World War II Enigma machine—the kind used by Nazi Germany to encrypt communications.
This machine is not merely decoration; it is a declaration.
The company loves cryptography, loves puzzles, and enjoys building a world in a language that can only be appreciated by a few.
The programming language of Jane Street's core trading systems is OCaml.
OCaml is a functional programming language known for its strong type system and logical rigor, but hardly any other companies in the finance industry use it. As of 2023, Jane Street's OCaml codebase exceeds 25 million lines—The Financial Times points out that this is about half the volume of code at the Large Hadron Collider.
This choice may seem odd, but has profound engineering logic: in financial trading systems, a single line of code bug can cause losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. OCaml's type system forces the elimination of many potential errors at compile time, making it harder to write code that crashes at runtime compared to C++.
The downside is: engineers who have worked at Jane Street often find it hard to be "digested" by other companies due to their proficiency in OCaml. According to headhunters: "People stay at Jane Street because they love it there, but also because no one will poach you using OCaml skills."
This creates an unexpected moat: the tech stack binds talent.
It is worth mentioning that Jane Street has no CEO.
There are no clearly defined bureaucratic structures, no management hierarchy, and no titles like “Vice President” or “Managing Director” that are so familiar in the finance industry.
The Financial Times describes it this way: "An extremely profitable anarchist commune."
The company is governed by a group of 30 to 40 senior employees who make decisions collectively, operating through management and risk committees. These 40 individuals own about $24 billion of the company’s equity; they run various trading desks and business units, but they are not called “presidents,” they are just—owners.
All employees’ compensation is linked to the overall profits of the company, not individual trading performance. This means nobody will take excessive risks for their own bonuses, as losses are shared by all, and gains are shared by all.
In 2024, Jane Street paid approximately 3,000 employees $1.4 million in compensation.
That Jane Street intern recruitment screenshot is not just a marketing gimmick; it reflects Jane Street's consistent self-awareness: they are not looking for finance experts, but "people who enjoy solving interesting problems."
The "interview process is notoriously difficult." Candidates must answer probability questions, game theory questions, and expected value calculations under pressure, assessing underlying logical abilities rather than industry knowledge. According to the company, only a "very small proportion" of applicants will be invited for interviews.
The company does not use non-compete agreements—in an industry where signing non-compete agreements is almost standard, this is an extremely rare exception. Jane Street believes its competitive advantage is not a specific algorithm, but the cultural and capability density of the entire system, which cannot be easily replicated.
A senior quantitative analyst at a hedge fund pointed out that Jane Street is a paradise for traders, while Citadel Securities is more suited for quantitative analysts and developers. "Jane Street is trader-oriented, while Citadel Securities is more systematic," he explained, "traders are better at socializing, which is why Jane Street has a relaxed atmosphere and a prevailing poker culture."
Moreover, Michael Lewis, the author of the biography "Going Infinite," recalls that when SBF was at Jane Street, its trading floor had a set of "sound systems": different notification sounds corresponded to different trading statuses. There were Homer’s "D’oh!" from "The Simpsons," the 1-Up sound from "Mario," and even the famous line, "You must construct additional pylons" from the 1998 strategy game "StarCraft."
Noises abound. Some even thought the trader on the phone was playing video games because the noise was too loud.
This relaxed and deliberately odd atmosphere is a cultural marker they maintain while operating at full capacity.
SBF and election night 2016: from the most profitable to the most unprofitable
In 2014, a young man graduated from MIT and joined Jane Street, earning a salary of $300,000 in his first year.
His name is Sam Bankman-Fried, known as SBF.
He later founded FTX, only to destroy it himself and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. But before that, during his three years at Jane Street, he left behind one of the most dramatic nights in the company’s history.
During his initial interview, SBF was not asked the typical questions like "What did you do over the summer?" but faced a series of gaming challenges—actually gambling games. He had to quickly solve math problems or probability questions, such as "What’s the probability of rolling at least one three with two six-sided dice?" or "What’s the probability of rolling two threes with two dice?" These types of questions were easy for SBF, and he thrived.
As the questions grew more complex and the pace quickened, his performance became even more impressive. He "immediately realized that the key to the game was to quickly make judgments and take action on the expected value of bizarre situations." He understood that they were "testing his judgment and execution in chaotic situations—not getting hung up on questions whose answers he couldn’t know."
This gaming model tests the potential of future traders. But the real reward lies in applying these skills in practice. And practice came two years later.
During the 2016 presidential election, Jane Street's traders believed that if Donald Trump was elected, global stock markets would plunge. According to Lewis, to gain a competitive edge, Jane Street put SBF in charge of a project to design a system to predict election outcomes.
Their goal: to know the election results earlier than CNN and then to trade faster than anyone else.
SBF arranged for different traders to analyze voting data from each state. The system operated remarkably—Jane Street was able to predict results in several key states minutes or even hours earlier than CNN.
On election night, the system sent a signal just before midnight: Florida's voting data was heavily leaning toward Trump, with his victory probability jumping from 5% to 60%.
"We even had time to freak out, thinking there must be a number wrong, confirming there wasn’t, then saying: fuck it, sell."—SBF later told biographer Michael Lewis
According to Lewis's account, Jane Street shorted the S&P 500, with positions reaching billions of dollars, while shorting stock markets around the globe, betting on a market crash following Trump’s election.
By the time SBF went to bed, they had an unrealized gain of $300 million. This was the largest single profit in the company's history.
Three hours later, he returned to the trading desk to find the world had changed.
The market digested Trump’s victory and then... began to rise.
The U.S. market did not fall; it rose—because Trump was viewed by many as a pro-business candidate.
Jane Street's short positions became trapped in this upward surge.
"That trade that was once the largest single profit in Jane Street’s history became the largest single loss in history—a loss of $300 million."—SBF
From +$300 million to -$300 million, in one night, a net change of $600 million.
Jane Street did not punish SBF. They chose another way to evaluate him: the prediction system that SBF designed was accurate; his model was not wrong, the fault lay in the judgment of the market's reaction direction, which was not purely a mathematical problem. It is said that he was even praised internally for the precision of the prediction machine itself.
Due to his outstanding trading performance, Jane Street paid SBF $300,000 in his first year, increased it to $600,000 in the second year, and awarded him a $1 million bonus in the third year. It was estimated that if he maintained such performance, his annual salary would reach $75 million in ten years.
But he chose to leave, to establish Alameda Research and FTX—
and then created history again in another way.
Jane Street's alumni list
After the collapse of FTX, people were surprised to find that the Jane Street alumni network almost dominated the list of core individuals involved in the entire event:
SBF himself (Jane Street trader, 2014-2017). Caroline Ellison (Alameda CEO, SBF's ex-girlfriend and former Jane Street trader). Gabe Bankman-Fried (SBF's brother, former Jane Street trader but had a short stint and a somewhat awkward situation). Lily Zhang and Duncan Rheingans-Yoo (former colleagues of SBF, later founded Modulo Capital, which received about $400 million in investment from Alameda and is headquartered in the same building as SBF's Bahamas residence).
The density of this circle is hard to ignore.
Jane Street has nurtured some of the most important people in the crypto world of this era, whether in the sense of "importance" or otherwise.
*Part of the reason is that his brother had just left and started poaching people from Jane Street to join the competitive trading company he founded. Insiders claim that the two brothers didn’t speak for a long time.
A billion-dollar secret
This story started with a lawsuit but unexpectedly ignited a larger crisis.
In February 2024, two Jane Street traders—Douglas Schadewald and Daniel Spottiswood—suddenly resigned and jumped to hedge fund giant Millennium Management.
Jane Street immediately filed a lawsuit in April against the two and Millennium, accusing them of stealing a "highly valuable" proprietary trading strategy.
What is the core of this strategy? A seemingly casual detail revealed in court made everyone realize: this is a short-term index options strategy specifically targeting the Indian options market—it brought in over $1 billion in profit for Jane Street in 2023.
More specifically, after the two traders took this strategy to Millennium, Jane Street's profits in the Indian market plummeted by 50% in March 2024. Meanwhile, Millennium's Indian operations began to expand rapidly.
In December 2024, the case was settled with confidentiality terms, and the specific terms were not disclosed.
However, the "$1 billion Indian options strategy" revealed in the lawsuit drew the attention of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Many Indian retail investors suffered heavy losses in options trading; how could a foreign company earn such huge profits?
On July 3, 2025, SEBI issued a 105-page interim order announcing the conclusions of its investigation.
SEBI's description painted this picture:
On the expiration date of Bank Nifty options, Jane Street’s algorithm would buy a large amount of Bank Nifty component stocks and stock index futures after the market opened (9:15-11:46), with purchase volumes sometimes exceeding 20% of the overall market trading volume, including core weighted stocks such as Kotak Bank, SBI, Axis Bank. Meanwhile, Jane Street established a large number of short positions in the options market: selling call options and buying put options.
In the afternoon (11:49 until market close), Jane Street began reverse operations: selling off the stocks and futures bought in the morning to artificially pressure the index downward. By the time of the expiration day's closing price drop, the previously established short option positions profited massively.
On a day under close scrutiny by SEBI, Jane Street incurred a loss of about $7.5 million in spot and futures but made about $89 million in options. Net profit: $81.5 million.
From January 2023 to March 2025, SEBI statistics show that Jane Street achieved cumulative profits of ₹36,502.12 crore (approximately $4 billion) across all trading segments. Notably, Jane Street made profits of ₹43,289.33 crore in index options and stock options trading but incurred net losses of ₹7,208 crore in stock futures trading.
SEBI’s original text: "This outrageous behavior blatantly disregards NSE's clear warning issued in February 2025, indicating that Jane Street is not a trustworthy market participant like the vast majority of foreign institutions."
SEBI also added an uncomfortable background: the agency previously conducted its own statistics showing that 93% of retail options traders in the Indian derivatives market lose money, with yearly losses exceeding ₹1 trillion. Meanwhile, during the same period, professional trading institutions—including Jane Street—have enjoyed substantial profits.
On July 4, 2025, Jane Street was suspended from all trading qualifications in India, and its bank accounts were required to be frozen without permission for deductions.
On July 14, Jane Street deposited about ₹4,840 million (approximately $560 million) into an escrow account as requested, applying for the restoration of trading qualifications. On July 21, SEBI permitted it to resume trading—on the condition of continuing to accept investigations.
Jane Street denied all allegations in an internal memorandum, calling the accusations from the Securities and Exchange Board of India "highly inflammatory," claiming their activities were basic index arbitrage trading, "a core and ubiquitous mechanism for keeping the prices of related instruments consistent in financial markets," and filed an appeal. As of February 2026, the case is still under judicial review.
A new footnote to the Luna collapse
In May 2022, TerraUSD and Luna collapsed, the UST algorithmic stablecoin plummeted from $1 to worthless, and Luna fell from $116 to nearly zero, evaporating $40 billion instantly.
Perhaps we did not spend a moment thinking about the culprits of the collapse then, but four years later, this collapse gained a new footnote.
On February 23, 2026, Terraform Labs' liquidator Todd Snyder filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court against Jane Street.
The core of the lawsuit is a private chat group named "Bryce's Secret."
The group was created by Jane Street employee Bryce Pratt. He was a former intern at Terraform, later joined Jane Street, but did not sever his old ties—the other two people in the group were a software engineer and a business development lead from Terraform.
According to the lawsuit, this chat group was created in February 2022 and became a communication pipeline connecting Terraform’s internal operations with Jane Street.
On May 7, 2022, at 5:44 PM.
Terraform Labs quietly withdrew $150 million in UST from Curve's decentralized liquidity pool. This operation had no public announcement, and external parties had no way of knowing.
Ten minutes later, a wallet associated with Jane Street withdrew $85 million in UST from the same liquidity pool.
Combined, Terraform and Jane Street withdrew $235 million in UST from this liquidity pool, directly breaching the liquidity support for UST, causing it to begin de-pegging as panic set in.
Bloomberg quoted a core statement from the lawsuit: Jane Street’s actions allowed them to "eliminate potential risk exposure of hundreds of millions of dollars mere hours before the collapse of the Terraform ecosystem."
Two days later, on May 9, UST had already fallen to $0.80, and the collapse was irreversible. Bryce Pratt messaged Do Kwon and the Terraform team through the group chat, stating Jane Street "could consider purchasing Luna at a significant discount."
First moving the valuable items out during a fire, then coming back to ask the owner if they want to sell at a loss.
The defendants named in the lawsuit, apart from Pratt, also included Jane Street co-founder Robert Granieri (the only one still employed among the four founders) and employee Michael Huang.
Jane Street's response, however, was succinct: "Desperate litigation, transparent extortion."
They added that the losses of Terra and Luna investors stemmed from Do Kwon and Terraform management's "billions of dollars in fraud," and they would mount a vigorous counterattack.
That statement is not wrong. Do Kwon did plead guilty and was sentenced to 15 years; Terraform did indeed pay $4.47 billion in fines.
Yet "Do Kwon is guilty" and "others are innocent" do not mutually constitute.
A building may have a fatal flaw in structure; that's a fact. In the process of its collapse, someone moved the most valuable items out early—this is another independent legal issue.
What exactly is this company?
The story of Jane Street is hard to sum up in one word.
To say it is "one of the most profitable companies on Wall Street," the net income of $20.5 billion in 2024 is sufficient proof.
To say it is "the most elite talent screening machine," the extremely low acceptance rate, the OCaml skill stack that cannot be absorbed by external markets, and executives with exceptionally high salary levels all point to this conclusion.
To say it is "a deep player in the gray areas of the rules," the 105-page ruling from SEBI, the lawsuit from Terraform, the secret settlement with Millennium all lean toward this conclusion.
It could be all of the above.
In financial markets, information asymmetry always exists. What sets Jane Street apart is its ability to leverage this asymmetry to a system-level height.
“At Jane Street, a good trader is not considered truly good unless they can clearly explain why they are good.” —Michael Lewis, "Going Infinite."
What is the true price of the market at any moment? Where are the pricing deviations? How do we discover and trade faster than everyone else? These are questions that Jane Street seems to be constantly solving.
The mathematical problems during the interview process can be a puzzle; the collapse of Terra can be a puzzle; why Bitcoin "plummeted at 10 o'clock" after being sued is also a puzzle.
Jane Street describes itself as "a collective of puzzle solvers."
But as the market's attention begins to turn to Jane Street itself, it also becomes a puzzle.
Further reading: The $40 billion collapse and the knife at 10 o'clock every day—all point to the same name: Jane Street
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