In a sea of red, Jump Crypto briefly held $500M USDC

Crypto needs a main character. Today, it’s Jump Crypto.

As of earlier this morning, Jump had sent almost $136 million in ETH over the past four or so days to platforms including OKX, Binace and Coinbase, among others. 

The price of ETH had meanwhile sunk 30%, from $3,230 to $2,250.

But Jump trades a lot. It’s a market maker, after all. Its outbound transfers to exchanges only really tell half of the story — at best. 

Over the same four or so days (Aug. 1 to Aug. 5), $24.44 million in ETH has flowed back into Jump Crypto’s wallets from exchanges. 

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So, Jump Crypto has seen net ETH outflows to exchanges over the month-to-date of $111.5 million. (That figure includes wrapped and staked ETH tokens.)

It’s a lot of crypto, but scaled to the market, it’s not really that much. OKX’s ETH/USDT market is currently seeing over $2.1 billion in daily volume alone, according to CoinGecko.

That’s 100x more than Jump Crypto’s average daily net outflows right now. And then there’s the billions in ETH traded on Binance, Coinbase and others.

Still, the onchain data does show Jump Crypto increasing the volume of its ETH transfers to exchanges since July 25. 

Jump had apparently unwrapped liquid stake ETH via Lido six days earlier, amounting to 120,695.4 ETH ($317.1 million then, $271 million now).

The chart above shows the price of ETH over the past month, up until about 7 am ET today. Green plus symbols show hours in which net ETH flows into Jump Crypto’s wallets were positive. Purple diamonds are for hours where net flows were negative.

Jump Crypto has sent $449.52 million ETH to crypto exchanges since July 5, with $104.6 million returned at some point (net flows: negative $344.92 million).

More than two-thirds of Jump’s ETH outflows in that period occurred after July 25: $301.96 million. That was about five weeks after a CFTC investigation into Jump Crypto was first brought to light, on June 20. 

Read more: Empire Newsletter: A weekend selloff spooks crypto

Only $30.65 million ETH made its way back into Jump’s wallets — so it’s safe to say most of those transfers were meant to stay on the exchange, at least in the short-term. But the function of the deposits hasn’t been publicly disclosed, so the reason for Jump moving so much ETH to exchanges is unfortunately unknown.

For what it’s worth, Jump Crypto has been busy moving other cryptocurrencies around, not just ETH. There’s been slightly positive net flows for uniswap, BNB, shiba inu and maker, although all by less than $100,000.

Jump Crypto’s wallets also contain $2.42 million more in convex than it did this time last month. It’s likely all those flows have more to do with its market-making than its own buying and selling. 

Jump obviously has sums of ETH stored in crypto exchange accounts, and even potentially additional funds in undisclosed crypto addresses, which limits the scope of this analysis.

But going by what’s available, per Arkham Intelligence, Jump still had 4,233 ETH ($9.47 million) in its known wallets this morning, down from 126,960 ETH on July 5 ($378.72 million then, $284 million now). 

Had Jump really intended to liquidate a huge portion of its ETH, then it’s well on its way. 

The situation is fluid and changes by the minute. But trackable net flows for USDC over the past month had reached $433.15 million, briefly bringing its total to $500 million. At that point, USDC made up 85% of Jump Crypto’s identified onchain portfolio. 

Jump has since directed almost $80 million USDC to various exchanges — which again, could all be par for the course for a market maker of Jump’s size.

In any case, if Jump truly did cause panic, then the worst of it is probably over for now. Hopefully, the markets also see it that way.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the daily Empire newsletter. Subscribe here so you don’t miss tomorrow’s edition.

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