How Jump Crypto Is Supporting Web3 Projects Across the DeFi Ecosystem

Prior to his current role in the special projects group at Jump Crypto, Steve Kaminsky began his career in the traditional finance (TradFi) sphere, working in fixed income markets at Goldman Sachs. This experience has helped him understand the differences – and similarities – between these two interrelated worlds. Jump Crypto, the crypto arm of Jump Trading Group, focuses on ecosystem building, infrastructure development, quant research and trading, and has grown to nearly 200 employees globally.

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“The investment arm of Jump Crypto has never been about just deploying capital for the sake of deploying capital,” said Kaminsky. “The real goal is to partner with projects and communities that we believe in and can add our expertise to help grow.”

Jump Crypto’s list of investments includes major exchanges, blockchains and a variety of Web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Jump Crypto also has an in-house team of blockchain developers and researchers.

Currently, Jump Crypto is actively leading the interoperability product Wormhole and contributing to the on-chain oracle Pyth, which publishes high-frequency market data directly on-chain. Pyth’s mission is to help solve the oracle problem (which refers to the difficulty of connecting blockchains with external data) by bringing off-chain data to on-chain protocols. Pyth does so by aggregating prices from first-party sources.

“If there are problem areas within the digital asset ecosystem that we think need to be solved and don’t necessarily see promising solutions already in development, we feel empowered and capable to help build within that space. Pyth is a perfect example of this,” said Kaminsky in an email.

There are now nearly 75 data providers today actively contributing to Pyth, including some of the world’s top trading firms, major regulated exchanges and crypto-native firms. Kaminsky said that what makes this community of data providers so unique and powerful is each member owns their own data, greatly increasing the reliability of the network.

“It’s really exciting to see this level of collaboration. While Jump has healthy competition with many of these trading firms in traditional markets, on a project like Pyth we are peers in helping try to build the most robust and reliable crypto infrastructure to support DeFi and Web3. It’s pretty cool to see,” added Kaminsky in an email.

Pyth has been on mainnet, or tested and deployed, for over a year as an on-chain oracle. Natively built on Solana, Pyth recently announced that through Wormhole, its high-fidelity data will now be accessible to projects building on BNB Chain, and soon live on Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Aptos, Sui and many others. The primary users of Pyth are on-chain projects and protocols, but the use cases have also expanded off-chain. There are close to 100 price feeds, with plans in the works to add more and onboard additional data providers as well.