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Comment by w1nk | Hacker News Reader

These guys have specialized in building super low latency, line of sight microwave networks for trading, across multiple continents (chicago -> nyc, frankfurt -> london, etc):

https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-in-my-ba...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-08/the-gazil...

http://www.amsterdamtrader.com/2014/09/hft-in-my-backyard.ht...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...

They employ skills such as kernel driver optimization specialists to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of network card drivers.

What the fuck are they doing messing with this? Yikes.

edit - I answered my own question. These dudes specialize in arbitrage and being faster than everyone else. The crypto markets are insane with this right now. The professional frontrunners have entered the game.

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Yeah, Jump got on the map by being the first Chicago prop shop with a microwave line between Chicago and New York. They dominated the equity basis trade for a while.

Keeping your name out of the press and staying secretive is incredibly important and I'm shocked that they didn't just throw a fair amount of cash to this guy directly or offer it up as a donation to some Carl Sagan foundation (and offer to let him keep his e-mail address). $200k for a shop like that is literally the shells of peanuts and worth it to keep your name out of people's mouths.

Have you ever seen the OSINT where people figured out that the badges of certain military programs gave away the reason for their existence? https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/world/americas/01iht-pent... , this feels like one of those moments...wormhole.com for cryptos, LOL.

Jump bailed out Wormhole after the massive hack. This is already well known isn't it? [1] They own Certus One who developed the Wormhole bridge.

[1] https://decrypt.co/92709/jump-crypto-wormhole-defi

I would sell moneylaundering.com from 50k.

Close second to PoW crypto, in any competition for least-socially-useful investment of real physical capital.

> The professional frontrunners have entered the game.

Have long been in the game.

With free data and free APIs being ubiquitous in this industry from the ground up, its too tempting

Tradfi is not competing and largely in the same place it was 15 years ago. Have fun with paying to implement FIX protocol

There's a lot of work on being immune to front-running, or at least very resistant, involving things like encrypted txs and block shuffling. Seems promising!

On the other hand I believe FTX basically made their money trading arbitrage between the Asian and European markets on the price of bitcoin.

I have to imagine the existence of these guys in the space means whatever 'work on being immune' is probably not functioning very well :P.

These folks showing up in your trading arena means you've left money on the table and they're going to take that, and maybe some extra.

It’s a small slice of the pie - MEV is still possible on the majority of chains for sure! And if quick finality (I.e next block) is required, which it probably will be for simple transactions, it probably always will be somewhat possible. I’m optimistic it will be drastically reduced overall though!

They build a lot of open source stuff too: https://jumpcrypto.com/

Wormhole and Pyth and two projects they contribute quite a lot to all in the open.

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