Revealed: Mysterious Wallet Behind Terra (LUNA) Crypto Crash Identified

It has been nine months since the crypto project Terra (LUNA) experienced a catastrophic collapse in May of 2022. In the span of just one week in May, Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin, UST, was unable to keep its exchange rate pegged to the U.S. dollar value. As a result, both UST & LUNA’s price experienced a precipitous decline, with UST losing about 99% of its value. It’s speculated that there were a number of factors contributing to the massive crypto crash, as $60 billion got wiped out of the cryptocurrency space.

Mystery Behind “Wallet A”

In the aftermath of the LUNA crisis, numerous post-mortem examinations have been carried out, and a certain “Wallet A” has emerged as the primary suspect; shown to have played a significant part in the UST de-pegging event.

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According to Igor Igamberdiev, Head of Research at Wintermute, the “Wallet A” swapped 85 million UST for USDC, which caused an imbalance in the UST/3CRV Curve pool, which eventually led to the collapse of the Terra (LUNA) ecosystem. Going by his research, there is a good possibility that the wallet associated with last year’s UST depeg might belong to the trading firm Jane Street Group.

Igamberdiev’s study of the wallet’s transactions reveals that there is a “good possibility” that the wallet is associated with Jane Street. On May 3 of the previous year, Clearpool made an announcement that Jane Street had borrowed 25 million USDC from BlockTower using its permissioned lending pool. Based on this information, Igor was able to identify three addresses that belonged to the trading firm; one of these addresses, dubbed Wallet A, was of major relevance.

Multiple Wallets, Same Owner?

Two weeks later, the same wallet took out a second $25 million loan before moving the funds into a Coinbase wallet. However, Igamberdiev mentioned that the Coinbase wallet had been credited with 84.5 million USDC by the UST de-pegger prior to receiving the loan amount. And moreover, what comes as a surprise, Igor found that the wallet had no other interactions besides these deposits; therefore clearly indicating it was likely that the wallet belonged to the same entity.

4/7

Before receiving $25M from Jane Street, this Coinbase wallet received 84.5M USDC from the UST depegger after the fateful swap

This wallet didn’t have any other interactions other than the two mentioned deposits

Therefore, they are highly likely to belong to the same entity pic.twitter.com/vOz934hlzm

— Igor Igamberdiev (@FrankResearcher) February 28, 2023

Additionally, Igor noted that the wallet — supposedly owned by Jane Street — held UST on LUNA’s yield-bearing Dapp “Anchor” for a month, and added that this necessarily did not indicate that the entity had nefarious intentions. At the time of writing, Jane Street has not yet provided a response to any of these allegations. But the crypto crash that was precipitated by the LUNA debacle set off a year of cascading financial disasters that have not yet been abated.

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