[streblo]

Am I correct in understanding how firms like Jane Street work? They are a market maker - they run an exchange where buyers and sellers can transact. They can arbitrage these trades by connecting buyers and sellers where there is a price discrepancy. Something like that?

[TaylorPhebillo]

Almost always outside of crypto, the market makers and exchanges are different entities. Exchanges maintain order books- who is willing to buy or sell what, at what prices, plus a lot of rules about tie breaking, order visibility, "implied" prices (e.g. sometimes the combination of two products is logically equivalent to a third), etc. When orders "cross"- that is, someone is offering to buy at a price at least as good as someone is willing to sell for, the exchanges matches those participants and they are considered to have traded (though for a mix of technical and regulatory reasons, the trade actually settles two days later)

Market makers generally maintain offers to both buy and sell a product, generally ~all the time the market is open. For example, they might offer to buy up to 30 X for $0.99 or sell up to 70 for $1.01. If small buy and sell orders come in more or less randomly, the market maker will sell about as many X as they buy, for (1.01 - 0.99) a profit of 2c for each set of orders. The trick for a market maker is to offer the best price, so that they get any orders at all, while accounting for the risk that the person buying or selling from them (the liquidity taker) isn't just a random order, but is either market moving or correctly predicting the market is about to move- e.g. a market maker offering to buy a million shares of a X at $0.99 will lose a lot of money to someone who correctly predicted X is about to go to $0.70, and took them up on the full offer.

[hnbear]

The same in crypto too.

The big exchanges function much like a traditional exchange and Jane St, Virtu, etc all connect the same way (FIX) to make the market. Really crypto exchanges are just like FX markets.

Very little difference.

They light also be mining, but market making behaves the same as other traditional markets.