Jump's Kanav Kariya details the firm's growing footprint in Solana, governance, and blockchain use cases

"We're stepping more and more into an almost bigger focus in the building in crypto."

On this episode of The Scoop, Kanav Kariya, President of Jump Crypto joined host Frank Chaparro for a rare interview to discuss Kariya’s vision for its 100-person large digital assets division.

Launched in the late 1990s, Jump is one of the most active trading firms across equities and crypto markets. Kariya spoke about his path from an internship in 2017 at Jump to becoming the president of the firm's crypto wing.

"The way things work at Jump is you naturally assume positions and then you're kind of handed the role after," Kariya explained.

In addition to market-making and trading, Kariya outlined how the firm is also interested in building new projects. “The possibilities for the space are just far greater than DeFi and financial stuff,” Kariya said.

He went on to explain that a big part of the firm’s strategy has been to participate in governance and build on different networks, highlighting projects like Pyth, Oasis and Wormhole. Jump Crypto also has a dedicated staff building on Solana. 

“A lot of that is in translating the engineering work that we've done on building trading systems and bridging that over the building, tooling and contributing to these open crypto repositories," said Kariya. In fact, he announced that Jump Crypto is focused on putting healthcare networks on-chain via the Oasis Network.

Kariya also expressed optimism about non-fungible tokens or NFTs, saying that Jump Crypto is watching the evolution of NFTs as an asset class.

“There's no reason that those resources as an asset class couldn't evolve to be like any other tokens or financial products,” Kariya commented.

Episode 68 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Kanav Kariya, President at Jump Crypto.

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