Jane Street Group, LLC is a global quantitative and proprietary trading firm founded in 2000. It operates as a market maker and liquidity provider across a wide range of asset classes and financial products. The firm is recognized for its technology-driven approach to finance and a strong emphasis on quantitative research, collaboration, and problem-solving. ^[1]​

Overview and History

Jane Street was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in New York, NY. The firm describes itself as a "research-driven trading firm" with the slogan "Solving the puzzle of global markets." It employs its own capital to develop and execute quantitative trading strategies on more than 200 trading venues around the world. As of early 2024, Jane Street employed over 2,600 people. The firm maintains a culture focused on intellectual curiosity and collaboration, which is reflected in its recruitment process, known for challenging puzzles and probability questions designed to assess problem-solving skills. ^[1]

Business Operations

Jane Street's operations are divided between proprietary trading and client-facing services. The core of its business is proprietary trading, where it uses quantitative strategies to trade in equities, options, futures, commodities, bonds, and cryptocurrencies. The firm also offers liquidity and trade execution services to institutional clients, utilizing its proprietary technology and global market access. Jane Street is an active participant in global capital markets, providing pricing and liquidity for a vast array of securities. ^{[2] [1]}

Corporate Structure and Regulation

Jane Street Group, LLC is the parent company of several regulated subsidiaries that operate in key global financial centers. The firm has offices in New York, London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and Singapore. ^[1]

Its main regulated entities include:

• United States: Jane Street Capital, LLC and Jane Street Execution Services, LLC. Both are registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as broker-dealers and are members of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
• United Kingdom: Jane Street Financial Limited, which is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
• Netherlands: Jane Street Netherlands B.V., authorized and regulated by the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM).
• Hong Kong: Jane Street Hong Kong Limited (CE No. BAL548), regulated by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC).

These subsidiaries allow the firm to operate in compliance with local regulations in major international markets. ^{[2] [1]}

Technology and Culture

Technology is fundamental to Jane Street's identity and business model. The firm is known for its unique technology stack and a strong engineering culture that emphasizes collaboration, intellectual honesty, and continuous learning. ^[1]

OCaml and Software Development

Jane Street is one of the world's largest industrial users of the OCaml functional programming language. OCaml is the primary language used for nearly all of the firm's software, from its high-performance trading systems and research tools to its system administration utilities. The firm has made significant contributions to the OCaml ecosystem by developing and open-sourcing a large collection of libraries and tools. Key contributions include:

• Core Libraries: The firm developed and maintains Core, a comprehensive alternative standard library for OCaml, and Async, a library for concurrent programming.
• Build System: Jane Street created Dune, which has become the de-facto standard build system for the OCaml community.
• Compiler Development: The company actively contributes to the OCaml compiler and has developed its own variants, such as OxCaml, to add features like data race freedom for parallel programming. ^[2]

Hardware Design

The firm extends its engineering focus to the hardware level by designing its own hardware components using Hardcaml, an OCaml-based library for creating and testing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designs. This allows Jane Street to build highly specialized and performant hardware tailored to the specific needs of its low-latency trading operations. ^[2]

Culture and Public Engagement

Jane Street fosters an engineering culture centered on an apprenticeship model for training new developers, pairing them with experienced mentors on real projects. The firm's internship program is well-regarded, with projects frequently highlighted in a blog series titled "What the interns have wrought." ^[2]

The company actively engages with the technical and academic communities through various initiatives:

• Tech Blog: A public blog that discusses a wide range of topics, including OCaml, hardware design, neural networks, and bug-hunts in the Linux kernel.
• Podcast: The firm produces a podcast on engineering topics called Signals & Threads.
• Open Source: Jane Street maintains a dedicated portal to showcase its open-source projects and contributions.
• Sponsorships: The firm sponsors events like the Summer of Math Exposition (SoME) to encourage public engagement with mathematics. ^{[2] [1]}

Cryptocurrency Activities

Jane Street is a significant liquidity provider and market maker in the digital asset space, trading a variety of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Solana (SOL). ^[2]​

Bitcoin ETF Authorized Participant Role

Following the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States in 2024, Jane Street became a key Authorized Participant (AP) for several of these funds. In this role, the firm is responsible for the crucial market mechanism of creating and redeeming ETF shares. This process is essential for ensuring that an ETF's market price remains closely aligned with the net asset value (NAV) of the underlying Bitcoin it holds. As an AP, Jane Street functions as a critical piece of market infrastructure connecting traditional finance with regulated digital asset products. ^[1]​

The role of an AP comes with specific regulatory exemptions designed to facilitate orderly market-making. These exemptions allow firms like Jane Street to create or redeem ETF shares without an immediate, corresponding purchase or sale of Bitcoin on public spot exchanges. To manage the risk from this activity, APs often use derivatives like Bitcoin futures for hedging. When the futures market is in "contango"—where futures prices are higher than the spot price—APs can hedge their exposure while earning a yield (or "carry") from the price difference. According to Ryan McMillin, CIO at Merkle Tree Capital, this strategy can absorb large ETF inflows through derivatives hedging rather than direct spot market purchases, potentially muting price rallies. McMillin described the structure as a potential "yield-skimming machine for Wall St." that prioritizes institutional arbitrage. ^[3]​

Legal Issues and Controversies

Terraform Labs Lawsuit (February 2026)

In February 2026, Jane Street was sued by the administrator for the bankrupt estate of Terraform Labs. The lawsuit, filed on February 23, 2026, in Manhattan federal court, accuses the firm of insider trading, market manipulation, and racketeering related to the May 2022 collapse of the Terra-LUNA ecosystem, an event that erased an estimated $40 billion from the crypto markets. The plaintiff is Todd Snyder, the court-appointed administrator for the defunct company. ^{[4] [5]}​

The lawsuit alleges that Jane Street made substantial profits through a confidential trading arrangement with Terraform Labs. According to the complaint, in May 2021, Terraform granted Jane Street the right to purchase its LUNA and UST tokens at a discount. While purportedly for the purpose of helping Jane Street maintain UST's $1 peg, the suit claims this arrangement provided Jane Street with non-public information about the stablecoin's structural vulnerabilities and a risk-free arbitrage opportunity not available to the public. ^{[1] [2]}​

The plaintiff alleges that rather than supporting the peg, Jane Street used this "asymmetric information" to execute profitable trades that contributed to market instability. The lawsuit claims Jane Street made at least 1 billion. The complaint further alleges that the firm used its insider knowledge to unwind "hundreds of millions of dollars in potential exposure" just hours before the ecosystem's final collapse, avoiding significant losses. ^{[1] [2] [4]}​

Market Speculation and the "10 a.m. Dump"

News of the Terraform Labs lawsuit in February 2026 coincided with widespread speculation on social media platforms about Jane Street's potential role in a recurring market phenomenon known as the "10 a.m. dump." For several months, traders and analysts had observed a consistent pattern of heavy Bitcoin selling pressure that appeared daily around 10 a.m. Eastern Time. ^[5]​

Following the lawsuit announcement, speculators on the platform X (formerly Twitter) alleged a direct connection. One commentator claimed, "Jane Street was running an algorithm that dumped Bitcoin every single morning at 10 a.m. ... Crashing the price. Liquidating retail. Buying back lower. Rinse and repeat." This speculation intensified on February 25, 2026, when the alleged selling pattern abruptly stopped. The cessation coincided with a significant cryptocurrency market rally, where Bitcoin's price surpassed $70,000, Ethereum gained over 13%, and Solana rose by over 15%. This led Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas to comment on the market sentiment: "The bogeyman is gone." ^[5]​

Despite the circumstantial timing and widespread discussion, reports noted that there is no public evidence showing Jane Street was systematically selling bitcoin at a fixed daily time. ^[5] ETF specialists and other analysts clarified that the market mechanics observed are a standard feature of the ETF creation/redemption process available to all APs and not necessarily evidence of manipulation by a single firm. ^[3]​

Millennium Management Lawsuit (2024)

In early 2024, Jane Street filed a lawsuit against two of its former traders, Douglas Schadewald and Daniel Spottiswood, and their new employer, the hedge fund Millennium Management. The lawsuit alleged that the former employees had stolen a "highly valuable and secretive" proprietary trading strategy. ^[2]​