Jump Trading's ex-head of crypto trading in London joins forces with a young hedge fund manager
After FTX crashed, major electronic trading firms recoiled from the crypto space but, in recent years, they've been dipping their toes back in. Jump Crypto is one such firm, and was reportedly expanding its US crypto trading operations last summer. Its London trading head left around that time, and has since resurfaced at a crypto-native hedge fund.
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Chris Drew has joined crypto hedge fund Fasanara Digital as its head of trading. He was previously head of London digital asset trading at Jump but left in 2025. Fasarana Digital is run by Nikita Fadeev, who founded the fund aged just 25 in 2021. Drew is one of four hires that Fasanara has made in the past year.
Drew spent a total of 16 years at Jump Trading. He started out trading multi-asset strategies but began specializing in crypto in 2019, two years before the trading firm rebranded Jump Crypto as a different entity. The firm was accused of manipulating TerraUSD in a lawsuit filed in 2023, but Drew, who was only appointed to a leadership role that year, did not face any allegations.
Before Jump, Drew was a quant trader at Sun Trading, an early player in the high-frequency trading scene that was acquired by Hudson River Trading back in 2018. He was also a former spot FX trader at JPMorgan.
Nikita Fadeev told us that Drew's arrival is part of a broader push into "TradFi" markets as they "increasingly overlap" with crypto. He said that tokenized real world assets have more than doubled in market cap over the past year, particularly due to equities and commodities like metals and energy. Fasanara's not the only crypto firm making the leap; last week, Wintermute became eligible to become a market maker for securities exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange.
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