While Darkpool going after the Flash Boys may seem like something out of a comic book, it may be one of the most crucial battles being fought for the future of investing on Wall Street.

The Dark Pool in this case is IEX, an alternative trading system that has been active for a little over two years. The Flash Boys are High Frequency traders who’ve operated on wall street since the dawn of modern computing.

Who Are the Flash Boys?

To understand what’s been happening, you may need a little bit of background first. Let’s start with Michael Lewis’s bestselling book “Flash Boys.” Released in 2014, the book shot up to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list and stayed there for four consecutive weeks. The theme of the book was the speed of data and how it was affecting trading in the United States.

Lewis starts off by describing how the trading floor (full of screaming traders who were bashing phones and eyeing a ticker tape) came to be replaced by electronic trading systems. Since the trades were now done electronically, Wall Street was left at the mercy of the coders who designed the programs.

But it turns out that many high-frequency trading firms sprung up and invested heavily in getting nanosecond advantages in trades placed by ordinary investors. The book describes how these traders are basically front running markets and rigging the entire market in their favor.

Trading Speed Bumps

That’s where Bradley Katsuyama enters. Katsuyama was the head of electronic trading at the Royal Bank of Canada. While analyzing trades there, he noticed that predatory stock scalpers were ripping the bank off, by raising the price of stocks they knew were already ordered.All the transactions he noticed were in milliseconds which cannot be perceived by human beings, but was easily executed by computers.

Katsuyama left RBC in 2012 and set out to start a new stock trading venue he believed would be fairer to the investors. He established IEX as an alternative trading or a dark pool system in 2013.