Su Zhu & DCG Drama

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and let's do the right thing - learn stuff.

⭐️Today's selection:

• 🎭Su Zhu & DCG Drama
• 🕶 Cool Fact Tuesday
• 👌Selected Meme of The Day
• 📰Bite-Sized News

DRAMA, DRAMA, DRAMA

Before we get down to it, let's rewind a bit.

It all begins with 3AC (Three Arrow Capital), the notorious and corrupt crypto lender. And... its nefarious founders. Su Zhu and Kyle Davies.

The problem with them is... They are located in Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates. It's difficult to enforce foreign court orders there.

And that complicates things, because liquidators who aim to proceed with the bankruptcy procedures, can't make them cooperate and speed up the whole thing. So...

The public image of the duo is far from ideal, as they consistently remain uncooperative. But there's been an update to this story that captured the public's attention.

We're talking about the allegations made by Su Zhu, the founder of 3AC, against Digital Currency Group (DCG) and FTX.

According to Zhu, DCG and FTX conspired to attack LUNA (now called Luna Classic) and profited from doing so.

While these allegations have been met with skepticism, it's worth considering the possibility that they may be true.

After all, on June 8th, an unknown address transferred a massive amount of stETH to FTX, and two other large transfers of stETH from Celsius and Amber Group to FTX took place on June 9th and June 10th.

This adds up to a total of 235,227 stETH (worth approximately $347 million) being transferred to FTX.

Is it just a coincidence that these transfers occurred around the same time, or could there be more to the story?

stETH was tied to Anchor protocol on Terra. 

And this protocol was one of the reasons behind the initial Terra Luna's success, as it invited users to stake stakedETH (stETH) on it.By the way, stETH represents an equivalent amount of Ether (ETH) that has been staked on Lido Finance which we talked about yesterday.

Thereby, after the $UST collapse in MAY, gradually, stETH started experiencing trouble...

Until June, when sudden and large transfers of stETH contributed to the token losing value (1stETH ≠ 1ETH).

This caused some companies that had invested in it to lose a lot of money.

Therefore the accusations by Su Zhu could be translated as saying that attackers on stETH were the same who attacked Terra Luna's architecture. Who, Su Zhu alleges, could be SBF and CEO of DCG...

Yet, the community isn't entirely convinced — and a majority regard these accusations as Su Zhu's efforts to shift the blame from himself.

Since 3AC (Three Arrow Capital) appeared to be a large holder of stETH after Terra's collapse and Zhu didn't deal with it on time. 

But there's even more drama.

Cameron Winklevoss, the co-founder of Gemini, the crypto exchange, has grabbed the spotlight as well.

He published an open letter to... Barry Silbert. The CEO of DCG (Digital Currency Group). The same DCG that got accused by Su Zhu as well. 

Here's the summary of the letter:

• Crypto lending firm Genesis owes Gemini $900 million. DCG is the parent company of Genesis, the venture capital firm. Barry Silbert is the CEO of both companies.
• Allegedly, Genesis fails to repay Gemini, because... Genesis' parent company, DCG, owes Genesis around $2 billion.

Barry Silbert responded by denying that DCG owes money to Genesis, because they never borrowed anything.

Cameron Winklevoss responded by telling Silbert to stop pretending that DCG are 'innocent bystanders'.

So... We're 3 days into 2023. And as you can tell... The drama cart is already full. And this is definitely only the beginning.

TL;DR: 

Su Zhu, the founder of 3AC, accused DCG and FTX of conspiring against Terra Luna, stETH and profiting from it. At the same time, DCG received from Cameron Winklevoss who claimed that they're avoiding responsibilities and repaying their loans.

COOL FACT TUESDAY

Today is definitely the right time for a cool fact.

It's because on this day, on January 3, 2009, which was 14 years ago, something spectacular happened.

The Bitcoin Genesis Block was mined. The block that started the king of blockchains, Bitcoin.

The first block with 50 BTC coins was mined at 18:15 GMT, but was numbered (labelled) as 0, and was called Genesis.

And Satoshi Nakamoto even thought of placing an Easter Egg in it. 

In the Genesis block's hash, the text "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" is found.

This is the headline of an article in the British edition of The Times.

The article was about how Britain's finance minister, Alistair Darling, is forced to consider new measures to bail out the banks in the economic crisis.

Bitcoin presented itself, as the new, radical measure to solve the perpetual banking system's problems.

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY

BITE-SIZED NEWS

• Turkey Plans to Launch Blockchain-Based Digital Identity. Blockchainization of the world.
• Square Enix to Focus on Blockchain Game Development in 2023. Play 2 Earn doesn't equal a 'good game'. It's time to combine these factors.
• Italian Senate Imposes 26% Capital Gains Tax on Crypto Tradings. Mamma mia.