Kanav Kariya said he is leaving his job as the head of Jump Trading’s crypto unit, which he first joined as an intern.

“Today marks the end of an incredible personal journey for me,” Kariya wrote in a post on X announcing his departure from the high-speed trading firm.

Today marks the end of an incredible personal journey for me. It’s my last day at Jump, a moment I’m receiving with both a heavy heart and great excitement about the road ahead. I’m leaving with a set of awesome relationships and unique, invaluable and shaping experiences. It’s…

— Kanav Kariya (@KanavKariya) June 24, 2024

Kariya didn’t say where he was headed to next, saying only that he wants to “catch up on relationships and reading that I had set on the back burner.”

Kariya was named Jump Crypto’s first president in 2021, when he was 25.

His departure comes as Fortune reported that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating Jump’s involvement in crypto.

Jump Trading has a storied history in Chicago, where it was founded in 1999 by derivatives pit traders. It’s a leading firm in the secretive world of high-speed trading.

After founding its crypto arm in 2021, Jump emerged as a major market maker and investor in crypto assets.

Under Kariya, Jump helped to found Pyth, a decentralised network that provides offchain data like asset price feeds to DeFi protocols.

Jump also contributed to crypto bridge Wormhole, which connects Solana’s blockchain to Ethereum.

However, Jump suffered a series of blows during Kariya’s tenure.

The firm had to bail out Wormhole to the tune of $320 million after a massive hack in 2022. Last November, it spun off the bridge from its business.

Jump was a major investor in Do Kwon’s Terraform Labs, which used the firms’ market-making service for its stablecoin Luna.

In its lawsuit against Terraform and Kwon, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that a firm — unnamed, but later revealed to be Jump — had helped to maintain Terra’s peg during its collapse in 2021.

Jump reportedly profited handsomely off Terraform, while regular investors lost their money.

Reach out to the author at joanna@dlnews.com