Crypto Titans of Industry DESTROYED
Barry Silbert DCG, $BONK, $SAMO, Dog coins season, OpenAI, Justin Sun
The World of His Excellency Justin Sun
I have written about Justin Sun a couple of times in this blog. This post explores his past and how he is allegedly country hopping after extracting value (10 fig to 11 fig LIQUID value) in crypto by committing crimes and then buying passports, getting shady bank accounts and buying diplomatic passports.
Now he is next on the chopping block for crypto billionaires who are affected by the contagion. Sun is known for doing shady stuff and recently he launched his Tron Blockchain based algorithmic stablecoin USDD. If this sounds familiar to you this is because Sun’s stablecoin has similar mechanisms to Terra Luna’s UST. Only difference is that Sun’s stablecoin has a market cap of $700m and has barely grown since its inception.
I assume that most of the USDD is owned by Justin and he just uses it as his personal stablecoin. More recently Justin acquired crypto exchange Huobi. Funnily enough he acquired Huobi exactly a month before FTX’s demise. Man has a timing for these things.
Recently rumours started spreading that Huobi is insolvent and they have some shady stuff going on in their exchange and the services it offers. This coupled with the news that Huobi has just announced 20% lay offs isn’t the best news for the industry.
This coupled with USDD depegging, Tron crashing due to market conditions and Huobi insolvency rumours could cause a couple dominos to collapse in Justin Sun’s empire.
Also read this thread about how Justin apparently continues to rug his customers and users over at Huobi by closing accounts that profited from a token launch. While this is INSANE that a crypto exchange is closing your account for profiting too much, this is a Justin Sun exchange. Justin still owns Poloneix and it was revealed in a Verge article that allegedly Justin just ‘stole’ customer’s money if they didn’t touch it for a while. He’s wild.
Sun was definitely the most shadiest crypto billionaire before the death of FTX but now he is at number two and that’s not a good place to be. Personally think that Justin Sun survives this one. He publicly sold around $5 billion dollars worth of mainly ETH and BTC from his public wallets in November and December of 2021. He was the $4k ETH sell wall on Binance fwiw.
He then proceeded to cash out billions through circle redemptions and tether redemptions back to TradFi. He still continues to flex his massive wealth on chain by redeeming mid 8 figs worth of stablecoins EVERY SINGLE WEEK or even MULTIPLE TIMES A WEEK. I think these are Justin’s money from profitable trading strategies but the thread above seems to suggest that Justin was scamming Huobi users and rugging them before cashing out.
While he could have spent those buying Huobi and then supporting Tron or USDD, I think he still remains well capitalised. Also unlike Sam, he doesn’t ‘care’ about helping people or put in effort to maintain a fake identity as altruistic. He just wants to exploit as much money as possible in crypto and benefit himself and I think in worst case scenario he gets caught by three letter word agencies after years of being on the run or just abandons Huobi and writes it off if it is truly insolvent.
I think that this is a small something burger. Not at the scale of FTX/3AC/LUNA/CELSIUS/VOYAGER but still some bad news.
The World of Contagion
Saw this tweet on the timeline. Hmm.
Big week.
Also wild how all The Titans of Crypto are getting taken out one by one. These guys have been here for a decade since early years of Bitcoin, saw TOTAL CRYPTO MARKET CAP go from $1 Billion dollars to $3 Trillion dollars and then get their empire DEMOLISHED in this move from $3 Trillion to $800 Billion. Obviously these people getting rekt are still going to be millionaires (some of them at least) but their entire company/fund to ZERO and reputation ruined. 11 fig roundtrips hit different. Also I should learn comedy and get a red nose to fit in this circus of an ‘industry’.
The World of Dog Coins
Dog coins are all the rage for the past few days. Solana was pretty much dead but then some group of people create a ‘community run’ dog coin token called $BONK and airdrops it to various popular Solana NFT collection holders and Solana protocols (while keeping a chunk of tokens for themselves obviously).
This then went to increase by hundreds of multiples in days and as of this newsletter, it peaked at $300 million in market cap with very low liquidity (low 7 fig DEX liquidity when I last checked). It has also gotten a few exchange listings and is getting a couple more in the upcoming days.
While this is probably not going to end well for longer term holders (more than a day), this revived activity on Solana for a couple days due to hundreds of millions in volume per day for this dog coin. This also revived a bunch of dead Solana dog coins and one of the funnier coins to pump was $SAMO.
$SAMO was a dog coin that started off worshipping Sam Bankman-Fried and now it has distanced itself from Sam but Alameda was given a huge chunk of $SAMO for market making and still owns 4.77% of the total circulating supply. Funny how $BONK (started very anti sam/ftx/alameda) pumping led to $SAMO (started very pro sam/ftx/alameda) pumping. By the way these are all going to zero and going to end badly in the coming days/hours
