...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
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Despite a tweet on August 19 that "sites are coming back online", and a developer stating that they were "mostly back in control", the website apparently remained compromised for several days. The project reiterated via tweet on August 20 that the website was still not safe to use.
It's unclear how much was stolen as a result of the hijacking.
According to the grand jury indictment, Shetty planned to put the funds into cryptocurrency positions that "could have yielded returns of 20 percent or more annually", and planned to return 6% to Fabric, keeping the difference. This so-called "investment" contradicted the conservative investment strategy that Shetty had helped to draft for Fabric, and he concealed both the existence of the transfer and his involvement with HighTower.
Shetty "lost virtually all of [Fabric's] money" "within a matter of weeks", at which point he fessed up to Fabric. Shetty had placed all of the funds into protocols based around the Terra stablecoin, which collapsed dramatically only a month later.
Shetty has pled not guilty, and has been released on bond.
Terraport Finance launched on March 31, apparently having gone live without any sort of audit. On April 10, Terraport disclosed that an attacker had apparently managed to drain all project liquidity pools, making off with assets priced at around $2 million.
The criminal charges out of the US add to civil charges he's facing from the SEC, as well as an investigation out of South Korea.
According to the SEC, Kwon "repeatedly misled and deceived investors" about the characteristics and stability of Terra and Luna, and tricked investors into believing that a popular Korean mobile payments platform used the Terra blockchain.
Kwon has been on the run from the law since Korean authorities filed a warrant for his arrest in September 2022. An Interpol red notice followed soon after. He is reportedly hiding out in Serbia, and Korean authorities reportedly traveled there in early February to hunt for him.
Terra and Luna dramatically collapsed in May 2022, and South Korean authorities are still hunting for Terra leader Do Kwon, who is reportedly hiding in Serbia. Earlier this month, Korean authorities reportedly traveled to Serbia to try to locate him, but were unsuccessful.
Kwon claims that the report is a "falsehood", and "I don't know whose funds they've frozen". This joins his other claims, such as that he is "not 'on the run' or anything similar" (he is), and that Interpol didn't issue a red notice for him (they have).
Kwon and the others named in the warrant are currently in Singapore. In June, Korea banned current and former Terraform Labs employees from leaving the country, and in July Korean authorities raided multiple exchanges in connection to their investigation.
However, documents from the legal proceedings surrounding the now-underwater firm revealed that Hodlnaut had 317 million UST, which it liquidated at a loss when the previously dollar-pegged UST hit $0.85. In the filing, they wrote, "Due to the market's lack of liquidity, the average exit price of UST to USDC was around 42 cents on the dollar, resulting in realized losses to Hodlnaut Trading Ltd of about USD 189.7M. As a result, Hodlnaut's total debt to depositors of USD 500M became backed by realisable assets of around USD 315M as of 13 May 2022 due to the de-pegging event."
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