It has been nine months since the crypto project Terra (LUNA) suffered a catastrophic collapse in May 2022. In just one week, Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin, UST, was unable to keep its exchange rate pegged to its value US dollar. As a result, the price of both UST and LUNA plummeted, with UST losing around 99% of its value. It is speculated that there were several factors that contributed to the massive cryptocurrency crash as $60 billion disappeared from the cryptocurrency space.
Mystery behind “Wallet A”
In the wake of the LUNA crisis, numerous post-mortems were conducted and a certain “Wallet A” emerged as the prime suspect. it turns out that he played an important role in organizing UST de-pegging.
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According to Igor Igamberdiev, Head of Research at Wintermute, “Wallet A” exchanged 85 million UST for USDC, which caused an imbalance in the UST/3CRV Curve pool, which ultimately led to the collapse of the Terra Ecosystem (LUNA). Walking past him researchthere is a strong possibility that the wallet associated with last year’s UST depeg belongs to trading company Jane Street Group.
Igamberdiev’s study of the wallet’s transactions reveals that there is a “good chance” the wallet is related to Jane Street. On May 3rd last year, Clearpool made an announcement that Jane Street had borrowed 25 million USDC from BlockTower using its lending license. Based on this information, Igor was able to locate three addresses belonging to the trading company. one of these addresses, called Wallet A, was very important.
Multiple wallets, Same owner?
Two weeks later, the same wallet took out a second loan of $25 million before transferring the funds to a hot Coinbase wallet. However, Igamberdiev reported that the Coinbase wallet had been credited with 84.5 million USDC by the UST de-pegger before receiving the loan amount. And furthermore, what is surprising, Igor found that the wallet had no interactions other than these deposits. Therefore, clearly indicating that the wallet could belong to the same entity.
4/7
Before receiving $25 million from Jane Street, this Coinbase wallet received 84.5 million USDC from UST depegger after the fatal exchange
This wallet has had no interactions other than the two listed deposits
Therefore, it is very likely that they belong to the same entity pic.twitter.com/vOz934hlzm
— Igor Igamberdiev (@FrankResearcher) February 28, 2023
Furthermore, Igor noted that the wallet — purportedly owned by Jane Street — held UST on LUNA’s yield-bearing Dapp “Anchor” for a month, which did not necessarily indicate that the entity had malicious intent. As of this writing, Jane Street has yet to respond to any of these allegations. However, the crypto crash precipitated by the LUNA collapse triggered a year of cascading financial disasters that have yet to defuse.
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