Can three thousand people surpass Citibank and Bank of America? It really makes sense when you hear the story of Jane Street. The reason you need to know this company becomes clear.

Started in a small office in New York in 1999, this company now wields enormous influence in the financial markets, almost invisible. Looking at recent disclosures, you can understand exactly who Jane Street is and why it’s so quiet yet powerful.

The most astonishing thing is the scale of its profits. In 2024, net trading revenue was $20.5 billion, surpassing Citigroup’s trading division at $19.8 billion and Bank of America’s trading division at $18.8 billion. Think about how abnormal it is that a company with only 3,000 employees beat large banks with 220k employees. The figures for the first half of 2025 are even more dramatic. Quarterly revenue exceeded $10 billion, overwhelming Wall Street as a whole.

What’s unique about Jane Street is its culture. It has no CEO, no non-compete agreements, and hires based on “problem-solving ability” rather than financial experience. Its interviews are notorious, evaluating candidates with probability problems and game theory puzzles. That’s also why intern salaries are $300k.

But in recent years, the shadow of Jane Street has begun to emerge. The 105-page report published by India’s Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in July 2025 was shocking. It revealed that Jane Street had earned about $4 billion from algorithmic trading in the Indian options market from 2023 to 2025. According to SEBI’s investigation, they bought over 20% of market volume immediately after opening, then sold in the opposite direction before closing, exerting artificial downward pressure on the index. They reportedly lost $7.5 million in cash on a single trading day but made $89 million from options.

Even more intriguing are new suspicions related to the Terra/Luna collapse. In February 2026, Terraform’s liquidator filed a lawsuit against Jane Street, centering on insider information leaks. It claims that inside information from Terraform was shared in a private chat room created by Jane Street employee Bryce Pratt. The lawsuit alleges that, ten minutes after Terraform withdrew $220k from the Curve liquidity pool on May 7, 2022, a wallet associated with Jane Street moved $85 million. These two transactions are recorded as the start of the liquidity collapse of UST, spreading panic.

Jane Street denies all these allegations. Regarding India, they claimed their activities were merely basic index arbitrage, and dismissed the Terra case as a “desperate lawsuit” and “blatant extortion.”

It’s really hard to define this company in one sentence. Some see it as the world’s top trading firm in profits, while others view it as operating in regulatory gray areas. Its systematic use of information asymmetry is brilliant, but it’s also under suspicion of market manipulation. Jane Street calls itself “a collective of puzzle solvers,” but now they’ve become a huge puzzle that they themselves must solve.