It also doesn't help that all the title graphics have the same dramatic feeling and are certainly AI generated.
Edit: actually someone already found his article and posted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160848
No hard feelings.
I'm sure she'll be right on it...
Havel's greengrocer, placing the sign.
Carney at Davos, his eyes uncovered.
> 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!
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/jane-street-accused-o...
That point was the crux of Matt Levine's argument: Terra and Luna were unregulated and easy-to-game securities. So you can't complain when the smartest people on Wall Street figured out how to pop the balloon in their favor -- (not ai emdash) particularly when it's their job.
I will quote the first few paragraphs leading up to it though:
>The basic story of Terra is:
>Terra was a big crypto project, led by a company called Terraform Labs and a guy named Do Kwon, which at its peak had a market value of about $50 billion.
>It had a token, the currency of its blockchain, called Luna, which at its peak traded at almost $120 per token. It also had an algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD, whose mechanism was that it could always be redeemed for $1 worth of Luna.
>That’s a bad idea! The problem, which was extremely obvious and which everyone knew about, was that, if people lost confidence in Luna, there would be a death spiral: People would redeem TerraUSD for Luna and sell the Luna, which would drive down the price of Luna, which would lead to more redemptions, which would create even more Luna, until Luna was trading at a tiny fraction of a penny and every TerraUSD would be redeemed for millions of them.
>In May 2022 that very much happened. Terra collapsed, people lost a lot of money and Do Kwon got 15 years in prison for fraud.
>At its peak, though, Terra was a pretty big crypto project, and it had various dealings with some very smart and somewhat sharky trading firms like Jump Trading and Jane Street.
AI is turning the entire web into LinkedIn itisnotaboutism.
- "A new lawsuit doesn’t just revisit the $40 billion Terra-Luna meltdown; it questions whether..."
- "Ten minutes is not a coincidence. It is a trade."
- "It reads less like a rescue offer and more like a firm positioning itself..."
- "These are not isolated; they are part of Snyder’s broader efforts..."
- "Not just as bystanders, but as alleged participants..."
"A new lawsuit doesn’t just revisit the $40 billion Terra-Luna meltdown; it questions whether..." -- the purpose of a lawsuit is to question something (by making an allegation), you don't sue someone to "revisit".
"Ten minutes is not a coincidence. It is a trade." So is an hour, or thirty seconds, or...?
"Not just as bystanders, but as alleged participants" -- the "just" doesn't make sense; participants aren't bystanders.
Of the list, only "It reads less like a rescue offer" and "These are not isolated; they are part of Snyder’s broader efforts..." makes any sense in context.
The claim of artificial price inflation with Jump sounds more questionable but TFA doesn’t seem to put it front and centre
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.
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!
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...
It seems extremely unlikely to me, a casual observer of the shit show that was Luna/Terra, that the suit would be successful
If there is one benefit coming from crypto is that it explains clearly why finance is a regulated industry.
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?
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.
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!"
Like, if I make a company with ten billion shares, and then put shares for sale at $5 a piece, and you buy one, then my company would also have a $50bn valuation, by the same logic that Terra / Luna had a $50bn valuation.
It's like with Madoff; the billions weren't lost when it collapsed, the billions were already gone (or never existed).
I personally don't understand how any of this works.
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.