At the height of the USD Coin (USDC) panic, when news broke that much of its backing was stuck in the recently collapsed Silicon Valley Bank, Tron (TRX) founder Justin Sun traded millions of USDC.
Data from Arkham Intelligence showed that on March 11, Sun’s publicly known wallets transmitted 31 cumulative USD coin transactions with a total value of nearly $550 million. Of those transfers, 20 worth a total of nearly $309 million were in and 14 worth just under $317 million were out.
In the first transaction of the series, Sun sold 72 million USDC via decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch Network (1INCH) at 5 a.m. Data from CoinMarketCap shows that at the time, USDC was trading at just under $1, indicating that Sun expected the price to fall on the news.
All times proceed in chronological order from 5 am on March 11.
Then at 5:06, at an alleged discount of around 1%, Sun withdrew 11.626 million USDC from the Aave (AAVE) decentralized lending protocol and sold it at 5:11 on the 1inch Network. Similarly, at 5:37, at a discount of about 4%, he withdrew 10 million USDC from the TrueUSD (TUSD) USDC Uniswap (UNI) DEX liquidity pool and sold it on the 1inch Network.
Sun did the same with 9.5 million USDC from the USDC USDC Uniswap liquidity pool at 5:53 at a presumed discount of around 3%. Then at 6:12, when USDC was trading at a 4-6% discount, Sun withdrew nearly 4.8 million USDC from the decentralized finance (DeFi) Curve (CRV) protocol and sold it all on the 1inch Network. .
It then followed that up with another 7.55 million USDC from Curve that was sold at around a 6% discount on Unswap. Interestingly, this was an exchange for the decentralized stablecoin DAI which was backed in part by USDC and was also suffering from a lot of instability at the time.
At 7:24, Sun was also able to send another million USDC from the DeFi platform Venus Protocol to his Binance deposit address, at an alleged discount of between 4% and 8%.
Then, while still struggling to minimize potential losses from a potential USDC collapse after 7:40, he also sold another 12.2 million USDC from Curve on the 1inch Network and deposited another 1 million USDC on Binance.
While Justin Sun showed the ability to act quickly and anticipate a USDC sell-off that then drove the stablecoin to a maximum discount of 12%, he ended up limiting only potential losses and most likely would have been better off doing nothing. .
This cannot be said about ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who showed nerves of steel and confidence in USDC and acquired a fair amount of tokens at a discount in a successful trade.
