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At the height of USD Coin ($USDC) panic — when news broke that much of its backing was stuck in recently-collapsed Silicon Valley Bank — Tron (TRX) founder Justin Sun traded millions of $USDC.
Arkham Intelligence data showed that on March 11, Sun’s publicly known wallets broadcast 31 USD Coin transactions cumulatively worth a total of nearly $550 million. Of those transfers, 20 worth a total of nearly $309 million were inflows and 14 worth just under $317 million were outflows.
In the first transaction of the series, Sun sold 72 million $USDC through decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch Network (1INCH) at 5am. CoinMarketCap data shows that at that time, $USDC was trading at just under $1 — which indicates that Sun expected the price to drop on the news.
All times proceed in chronological order from 5am, March 11.
Then, at 5:06 — at a presumed discount of about 1% — Sun withdrew 11.626 million $USDC from decentralized lending protocol Aave (AAVE) and sold them at 5:11 on 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 them on 1inch Network.
Sun did the same with 9.5 million $USDC from the USDD $USDC Uniswap liquidity pool at 5:53 at a presumed discount of about 3%. Then, at 6:12 — when $USDC was trading at a 4% to 6% discount — Sun withdrew nearly 4.8 million $USDC from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve (CRV) and sold it all on 1inch Network.
He then kept doing the same with another 7.55 million $USDC from Curve that was sold at a discount of about 6% on Unswap. Interestingly, this was a swap for decentralized stablecoin DAI which was partly backed by $USDC and also suffered high instability at the time.
At 7:24, Sun was also able to send another million of $USDC from DeFi platform Venus Protocol to his Binance deposit address — at a presumed discount between 4% and 8%.
Then, as he kept scrambling to minimize potential losses from a possible $USDC collapse after 7:40, he also sold another 12.2 million $USDC from Curve on 1inch Network and deposited another million $USDC on Binance.
While Justin sun showed the ability to act quickly and anticipate a major $USDC sell-off that later brought the stablecoin to a maximum discount of 12%, he ended up only limiting potential losses and would most probably still have been better off not doing anything.
This cannot be said about ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin who showed steel nerves and trust in $USDC and acquired a good amount of tokens at a discount in a successful trade.