I just noticed something interesting about Jane Street. It really seems that their profit-making model may not be as simple as people think.

Judging by the events in India, the story is quite clear. Between January 2023 and March 2025, they generated net profit of approximately 365 billion rupees, but SEBI found that there was 48.4 billion rupees that may have come from illegal activities. The company was temporarily banned and the funds were frozen.

What’s interesting is the mechanism behind it. According to SEBI, they have a separate organizational structure, which allows the visible trading platform and the entities that actually earn the profits to be separated. In India’s market, they heavily buy Bank Nifty stocks and futures in the morning, then sell them off in the afternoon. This selling pressure makes the index fall, but the part that earns the most is their large options positions, which are several times larger than their stock holdings.

This isn’t something that happens only once. In the crypto market, we can see similar patterns. It has been observed that around 10:00 AM US time, there is often a sudden wave of selling. This is when the US market opens and liquidity is high. In highly leveraged markets like crypto, a 2–3% drop is enough to liquidate many long positions, creating a chain reaction of forced selling.

What I find particularly interesting is the Terra collapse in 2022. This company had complicated connections. According to reports, they sold $85 million worth of UST during a period when liquidity was extremely weak, and there were communications with Terra’s founders about buying Bitcoin at a discount. If Terra was forced to defend its pegged exchange rate, they would have had to sell Bitcoin quickly.

The most important matter is the lawsuit against Millennium in 2024. Two high-level index options traders from Jane Street went to work at Millennium Management. They were sued for allegedly stealing secret strategies. During the case, it was revealed that this strategy made profits of about $1 billion in 2023 alone. This number changes everything. This isn’t a small-margin strategy; it’s a massive profit-making machine.

But even more interesting is that most of the details were hidden. Most of the court documents were blocked. No one could see the algorithm, and no one could see the execution model—only the profit figures.

What worries me is that one of FTX’s founders previously worked at Jane Street for about three years. Later, FTX invested in Anthropic early on. When FTX collapsed, Anthropic stock was sold off. Jane Street bought part of it for about $100 million. Now it’s worth $2.1 billion.

There are other events too. SEBI’s temporary bans, the ongoing Terra lawsuit, and large Bitcoin ETF positions—all converge on the same company.

It’s not that each individual event can be proven to be wrongdoing. But this pattern is quite notable. Every time the market experiences major unrest, you often see Jane Street involved in some way—either because they’re one of the largest trading firms in the world, or because there’s something deeper about how they position themselves. It’s a question that still has no clear answer.