For me it's the constant feel of everything being "exciting" while no real information is actually conveyed. It's a common tactic of both AI and clickbaity articles. There's no hard evidence here, just hearsay. Nothing really to report until there's more information. I don't want drama in reporting, I want facts. But I guess I'm an outlier which is how we got both this AI style and the clickbait it was trained on...
It also doesn't help that all the title graphics have the same dramatic feeling and are certainly AI generated.
> Look, I am sorry. But if you go to Jump Trading and Jane Street and say “hello, I have an unregulated poorly designed mechanism that could lead to $50 billion of market value collapsing overnight, would you like to trade with me,” they are going to say yes, but their eyes are going to light up, you know? If at Time 0 you give them an extremely gameable system that can produce billions of dollars of profit, at Time 10 your system is going to be a smoking wreckage and they are going to have billions of dollars of profit. That’s their whole job, you know? I couldn’t tell you in advance what all the intermediate steps will be, and in fact in hindsight I cannot tell you what the intermediate steps actually were, how Jump and Jane Street made money off the collapse of Terra. But as a heuristic, I mean, come on. Terra was like “hello we have a balloon full of money, here is a pin, dooooooon’t pop the balloon.” Guess what!
Didn't many of the FTX cronies come from Jane Street?
So many of the biggest fraudsters in crypto came from tradfi and their scams were discovered because they picked the one asset class where being unable to process withdrawals implies a 100% chance of fraud. It makes you wonder how much fraud occurs in tradfi but it goes undiscovered because nobody can self-custody their paper metals or paper stocks.
What do you want? Regulated or unregulated securities?
You can't invest in unregulated FTX and then whine when they went and lost all your money -- (not ai emdash) because it was -- wait for it -- UNREGULATED!
> It makes you wonder how much fraud occurs in tradfi but it goes undiscovered because nobody can self-custody their paper metals or paper stocks.
Better not mention the FinCEN files either. [0] Where over $100B to $2TN dollars worth of illicit transations from criminals and fraudsters were knowingly allowed by banks and even ponzi schemes were freely allowed as well [1].
10mins is a lifetime in capital and crypto markets - I find it hard to believe that trading 10mins after the Terraform Labs swap hit the chain constitutes insider trading.
The claim of artificial price inflation with Jump sounds more questionable but TFA doesn’t seem to put it front and centre
Doesn’t that 10m lag make it seem more like insider training? An automated trade would happen nearly instantly, 10m is plenty of time for insiders to send some texts or make some calls.
Especially since it's a public ledger. Anyone with a program watching the chain is going to see it. From there they can exercise whatever trade they want for their gain.
>On May 7, 2022, Terraform Labs withdrew 150 million TerraUSD from the Curve3pool without any public announcement. Within 10 minutes, a wallet allegedly linked to Jane Street withdrew an additional 85 million TerraUSD...
I thought the whole idea of crypto is that everything is public on the blockchain. Presumably anyone could have seen the $150m withdrawal and reacted? It doesn't seem very insider information.
It's a bad headline. They used publicly available blockchain transactions and didn't cause the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. Terra collapsed because it was a Ponzi scheme offering 20% APY on a fake stablecoin. The Terra stablecoin was not backed by real dollars, but instead by a cryptocurrency called Luna that did nothing else other than let you issue Terra stablecoins.
That’s the lesson we should be learning, but I’m worried the lesson we’re actually learning <sees 18yo crypto bro drive by in a Lamborghini> is that regulations hinder innovation.
Saying Jane Street caused a $40 billion loss is wrong. Terra caused the loss because it was a Ponzi scheme that claimed to offer 20% APY on a stablecoin that wasn't backed by any real dollars.
This is just obnoxious. Invest in experimental instruments without doing your due diligence and that's on you. If you don't have the humility to reckon with that you definitely don't deserve $40b of other peoples' fake money.
"I am sorry. But if you go to Jump Trading and Jane Street and say “hello, I have an unregulated poorly designed mechanism that could lead to $50 billion of market value collapsing overnight, would you like to trade with me,” they are going to say yes, but their eyes are going to light up, you know? If at Time 0 you give them an extremely gameable system that can produce billions of dollars of profit, at Time 10 your system is going to be a smoking wreckage and they are going to have billions of dollars of profit. That’s their whole job, you know? I couldn’t tell you in advance what all the intermediate steps will be, and in fact in hindsight I cannot tell you what the intermediate steps actually were, how Jump and Jane Street made money off the collapse of Terra. But as a heuristic, I mean, come on. Terra was like “hello we have a balloon full of money, here is a pin, dooooooon’t pop the balloon.” Guess what!"
> The Anchor Protocol was a lending and borrowing protocol built on the Terra chain. Investors who deposited UST in the Anchor Protocol were receiving a 19.45% yield paid out from Terra's reserves.
It was a system built on sleight of hand, with a cover story just complex enough that it worked for a while.
How do you create a stablecoin? There are two ways in general. One is to have it backed 1:1 with a bank account somewhere that contains the actual currency it represents. In theory you then allow people to freely exchange back and forth between tokens and dollars. Tether kinda/sort works this way in theory.
The other way is to play games with algorithms and try to use the market against itself to create stability. Terra (UST) attempted to do this by running a complex scheme that leveraged a floating backing token, Luna, and a smart contract which allowed you to exchange 1 UST for $1 worth of newly created Luna. If UST starts to lose its peg and become worth less than a dollar, people buy it to exchange for $1 worth of Luna, sell the Luna for a profit, so arbitrage sorts the price out. If it becomes worth more than a dollar, you buy Luna, burn it to convert to new UST, then sell that for a profit, adding sell pressure and diluting the supply.
Even with the best will in the world systems like this could best be described as meta-stable, i.e. it'll smooth out minor perturbations but there are limits.
One major problem is how do you get Luna to be worth anything though? Well you offer inducements like a ridiculous interest rate, high enough that anyone outside the cryptocurrency bubble would immediately see a red flag, and which then has to be subsidised by ... creating more tokens.
Eventually the limit was discovered, Luna dumped massively and the whole illusion collapsed.
You have to connect this to the market or the article. I certainly don’t believe Jane Street is keeping crypto down somehow. What kind of non-conspiracy theory are you proposing?
Look I’m happy to play “pin the tail on the finance bros”, and I hate crypto with a passion, but I don’t see evidence here.
The company in charge of a crypto thing made a sudden (and I assume unexpected) withdraw of $150 million.
Jane Street, who worked with them, dumped $80 million within 10 minutes.
Are we supposed to think Jane Street wasn’t supposed to be monitoring what was going on? If I was working with a bunch of crypto people who suddenly took out a ton of money without warning me, I can absolutely see wanting to pull my money before everything collapses. Crypto is volatile.
As other people pointed out, this is 10 MINUTES. You don’t need secret information to notice something happening that fast. You need dial-up. That would be plenty fast enough.
Sure if you can actually produce records where someone from TerraLabs said “we are running away, pull out quick“ fine. But even then… if they waited most of 10 minutes did they even need that information? It’s not like rug pulls are an unknown thing in crypto.
I get the lawyer wants to help his clients but unless he gets some discovery and finds something pretty damning I’m not sure there’s anything here. I was expecting to see one of those allegations where they did it within like two seconds. I can see two seconds being collusion.
Infernal|4 days ago
godelski|4 days ago
It also doesn't help that all the title graphics have the same dramatic feeling and are certainly AI generated.
consumer451|4 days ago
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
necubi|4 days ago
> Look, I am sorry. But if you go to Jump Trading and Jane Street and say “hello, I have an unregulated poorly designed mechanism that could lead to $50 billion of market value collapsing overnight, would you like to trade with me,” they are going to say yes, but their eyes are going to light up, you know? If at Time 0 you give them an extremely gameable system that can produce billions of dollars of profit, at Time 10 your system is going to be a smoking wreckage and they are going to have billions of dollars of profit. That’s their whole job, you know? I couldn’t tell you in advance what all the intermediate steps will be, and in fact in hindsight I cannot tell you what the intermediate steps actually were, how Jump and Jane Street made money off the collapse of Terra. But as a heuristic, I mean, come on. Terra was like “hello we have a balloon full of money, here is a pin, dooooooon’t pop the balloon.” Guess what!
nubg|4 days ago
> Ten minutes is not a coincidence. It is a trade.
jlund-molfese|4 days ago
manoDev|4 days ago
AI is turning the entire web into LinkedIn itisnotaboutism.
tzs|4 days ago
cynicalkane|4 days ago
int32_64|4 days ago
So many of the biggest fraudsters in crypto came from tradfi and their scams were discovered because they picked the one asset class where being unable to process withdrawals implies a 100% chance of fraud. It makes you wonder how much fraud occurs in tradfi but it goes undiscovered because nobody can self-custody their paper metals or paper stocks.
mcmcmc|4 days ago
bb88|4 days ago
You can't invest in unregulated FTX and then whine when they went and lost all your money -- (not ai emdash) because it was -- wait for it -- UNREGULATED!
rvz|4 days ago
Better not mention the FinCEN files either. [0] Where over $100B to $2TN dollars worth of illicit transations from criminals and fraudsters were knowingly allowed by banks and even ponzi schemes were freely allowed as well [1].
[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54225572
cindyllm|4 days ago
[deleted]
wuiheerfoj|4 days ago
The claim of artificial price inflation with Jump sounds more questionable but TFA doesn’t seem to put it front and centre
jkubicek|4 days ago
thrwaway55|4 days ago
tim333|4 days ago
I thought the whole idea of crypto is that everything is public on the blockchain. Presumably anyone could have seen the $150m withdrawal and reacted? It doesn't seem very insider information.
rowanG077|4 days ago
qgin|4 days ago
tripplyons|4 days ago
jsemrau|4 days ago
If there is one benefit coming from crypto is that it explains clearly why finance is a regulated industry.
jkubicek|4 days ago
tripplyons|4 days ago
blurbleblurble|4 days ago
etc-hosts|4 days ago
https://twitter.com/FatManTerra
Cappsmark95|4 days ago
readams|4 days ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-02-24/ai-...
"I am sorry. But if you go to Jump Trading and Jane Street and say “hello, I have an unregulated poorly designed mechanism that could lead to $50 billion of market value collapsing overnight, would you like to trade with me,” they are going to say yes, but their eyes are going to light up, you know? If at Time 0 you give them an extremely gameable system that can produce billions of dollars of profit, at Time 10 your system is going to be a smoking wreckage and they are going to have billions of dollars of profit. That’s their whole job, you know? I couldn’t tell you in advance what all the intermediate steps will be, and in fact in hindsight I cannot tell you what the intermediate steps actually were, how Jump and Jane Street made money off the collapse of Terra. But as a heuristic, I mean, come on. Terra was like “hello we have a balloon full of money, here is a pin, dooooooon’t pop the balloon.” Guess what!"
yunnpp|4 days ago
klodolph|4 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_(blockchain)
> The Anchor Protocol was a lending and borrowing protocol built on the Terra chain. Investors who deposited UST in the Anchor Protocol were receiving a 19.45% yield paid out from Terra's reserves.
What the fuck?
Nursie|4 days ago
How do you create a stablecoin? There are two ways in general. One is to have it backed 1:1 with a bank account somewhere that contains the actual currency it represents. In theory you then allow people to freely exchange back and forth between tokens and dollars. Tether kinda/sort works this way in theory.
The other way is to play games with algorithms and try to use the market against itself to create stability. Terra (UST) attempted to do this by running a complex scheme that leveraged a floating backing token, Luna, and a smart contract which allowed you to exchange 1 UST for $1 worth of newly created Luna. If UST starts to lose its peg and become worth less than a dollar, people buy it to exchange for $1 worth of Luna, sell the Luna for a profit, so arbitrage sorts the price out. If it becomes worth more than a dollar, you buy Luna, burn it to convert to new UST, then sell that for a profit, adding sell pressure and diluting the supply.
Even with the best will in the world systems like this could best be described as meta-stable, i.e. it'll smooth out minor perturbations but there are limits.
One major problem is how do you get Luna to be worth anything though? Well you offer inducements like a ridiculous interest rate, high enough that anyone outside the cryptocurrency bubble would immediately see a red flag, and which then has to be subsidised by ... creating more tokens.
Eventually the limit was discovered, Luna dumped massively and the whole illusion collapsed.
medi8r|4 days ago
tempodox|3 days ago
sam0x17|4 days ago
irjustin|4 days ago
fn-mote|4 days ago
waxie|4 days ago
MBCook|4 days ago
The company in charge of a crypto thing made a sudden (and I assume unexpected) withdraw of $150 million.
Jane Street, who worked with them, dumped $80 million within 10 minutes.
Are we supposed to think Jane Street wasn’t supposed to be monitoring what was going on? If I was working with a bunch of crypto people who suddenly took out a ton of money without warning me, I can absolutely see wanting to pull my money before everything collapses. Crypto is volatile.
As other people pointed out, this is 10 MINUTES. You don’t need secret information to notice something happening that fast. You need dial-up. That would be plenty fast enough.
Sure if you can actually produce records where someone from TerraLabs said “we are running away, pull out quick“ fine. But even then… if they waited most of 10 minutes did they even need that information? It’s not like rug pulls are an unknown thing in crypto.
I get the lawyer wants to help his clients but unless he gets some discovery and finds something pretty damning I’m not sure there’s anything here. I was expecting to see one of those allegations where they did it within like two seconds. I can see two seconds being collusion.
unknown|4 days ago
[deleted]