Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

The US was now, in Sam’s mind, the holy grail. It had an incumbent crypto exchange, Coinbase. But Coinbase’s CEO had already written insulting tweets about the SEC. And Coinbase, compared to FTX, was a boring and bloated casino. It had fifteen times the number of employees FTX did, and only about a fifth of FTX’s volume. Charging retail investors f

Up to that moment, in late November 2018, Alameda Research had operated in the shadows. They traded more than 5 percent of the total volume of crypto markets and were still a secret. Jane Street had left Sam with the view that there was no upside to publicity, and that the best thing to do was to avoid it. He’d traded billions of dollars in crypto

Part of Sam’s day was spent bringing the price of lots of ham and cheese sandwiches into line with the cost of their ingredients. He spent the first ninety minutes of every trading day just figuring out what was inside the sandwich—as overnight the precise content of the ETFs would change. The least exciting part of his job, the sandwich game was n

The remaining employees were also in the position of Bob’s friend, in that most of them didn’t understand what had happened. Sam had fully absorbed the Jane Street management technique of letting the rank and file see only their tiny piece of the puzzle, reserving for himself a view of the whole. Gary, though unintentionally, had done something sim

far too small to deal with the massive flood of transactions that Wall Street handles in that time frame.