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James Hunsaker, a former employee of Jump Trading, made a shocking statement in the Terraform Labs case today. Hunsaker revealed that he had filed a notice against Jump Trading with the SEC, alleging Do Kwon's role in backing the UST algorithmic stablecoin before its $40 billion collapse in 2022.
Jump Trading Spent Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Save LUNA 1 Year Before the Real Collapse
According to the statement, Jump Trading, a mysterious frequent trading firm that also owns cryptocurrency, had entered into a “significant agreement” with Terraform Labs (TFL) to increase adoption of UST.
Hunsaker, who worked at Jump Crypto before founding the blockchain startup Monad Labs, stated that when UST left the $1 peg in May 2021, Jump Crypto president Kanav Kariya said, “I talked to Do, he will give us tokens to be unlocked later.” .
Following this, Jump Trading co-founder Bill DiSomma directed investors to take “aggressive trades” and accumulate UST. Hunsaker described DiSomma as the real boss of Jump Crypto, rather than Kariya. “Since Terra was a large and important project for Jump, he was willing to risk several hundred million dollars to do it,” Hunsaker testified.
Both Kariya and DiSomma exercised their right of non-response in their statements to the SEC for the Terraform Labs case. The SEC stated that Jump made approximately $1 billion in profits through its deals with Terraform Labs.
A key part of the SEC's fraud case against TFL and Do Kwon was their claim that they concealed Jump's role in saving UST during the May 2021 depeg before the actual 2022 collapse. Kwon claimed that UST was “automatically self-healing,” and investors believed it.
Hunsaker left Jump in February 2022. After the debacle in May, she attempted to share her experiences on Reddit and anonymously. In August 2022, he filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC. “When I saw the impact of May 2022 on all of its victims, I sought to ensure that some form of justice and compensation was provided,” Hunsaker told the court.
Interestingly, Hunsaker had invested $200,000 of his own money into UST to get a ~20% return on Anchor Protocol. Despite his doubts about the stability of the UST, he believed that he could exit quickly if necessary. He sold his UST on May 7 or 8, 2022, when the depeg started.