Igor Igamberdiev, head of research at Wintermute, speculated on Twitter on Tuesday that the wallet connected to the TerraUSD (UST) depeg from the previous year may be owned by Jane Street, a major global proprietary trading company.
TerraUSD Depeg: Analysis
In May 2022, the TerraUSD stablecoin, also known by the ticker UST (now USTC), crashed, leaving investors with a loss of tens of billions of dollars. Igamberdiev stated that there is a “good chance” the wallet is connected to Jane Street depending on transaction investigation.
On May 3 of last year, Clearpool revealed that Jane Street had lent BlockTower 25 million USDC using its public blockchain lending pool. Interestingly, Igamberdiev outlined three addresses linked to the trading firm, with Wallet A being of special interest.
Two weeks later, the same wallet took out a $25 million loan once more before putting the money into a Coinbase wallet. Igamberdiev stated that the wallet in question got 84.5 million USDC from the TerraUSD de-pegger before stating that the wallet had no other interactions besides these deposits, indicating that it was “highly likely to belong to the same entity.”
Igamberdiev mentioned that the wallet had stored TerraUSD on Anchor for a month, and he added that this “wouldn’t necessarily mean that Jane Street had malicious intent.”
On its website, Jane Street describes itself as a quantitative trading company and liquidity supplier with a special emphasis on technology and group problem-solving. Notably, it has five worldwide headquarters: one each in Singapore, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, London, and New York.
It’s interesting to note that SBF and FTX’s sibling company, Alameda Research, made some dubious investments by sending more than $400 million in FTX customer deposits to a handful of former Jane Street traders. Also in January, Brett Harrison, the former president of FTX.US, brought back his memories of working with Bankman-Fried at Jane Street Capital.
