Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

To open a crypto account on a South Korean exchange, just for starters, you needed to be South Korean. “We found a graduate student friend in South Korea and traded in his name,” recalled Nishad, who now saw why maybe it would take Jane Street a while to export radical efficiency to crypto markets. Jane Street would smell legal trouble; Jane Street would at the very least be embarrassed if it wound up as news in the New York Times that they’d hired a South Korean grad student to front their business. “It was borderline illegal, but in practice, who goes after you when you do this?” said Nishad later. “No one.” This was the very beginning of Nishad’s financial education: there were laws that, in theory, governed money; and then there was what people actually did with money. “That’s where I learned what the law is,” said Nishad. “The law is what happens, not what is written.”